Hello,

Looking at schema.org and Google, neither specify a certain number or reviews are required before integrating aggregate rating structured data.That being said, we usually start with a few reviews before integrating aggregate rating markup. Whitespark actually has a good guide for integrating this.

Hope this helps.

Hello,

Is the content on the same domain or different domains? I ask because I recently came across a similar question in another Moz Q&A that may be of some use to you.

Hello,

With Wordpress I believe you can just add it under all that code, like below. After you make the changes, I would suggest opening a private browser window or clearing your cache and make sure the site, pages and redirects are coming up as intended, since .htaccess changes can sometimes be a bit hairy and cause the site to white screen or cause infinite loops.

BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

END WordPress

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !^on$
RewriteRule (.*) https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Hello,

I have not heard of this kind of setup affecting SEO performance, but I could be wrong. Even if you didn't have the old URL structure and incoming links, I would still have these redirects to ensure all the current site links are only accessible via one type of URL, https, non-www.

These are the two redirects I have used in my .htaccess file to achieve what you are looking for. In the network I only see as one redirect listed though, not two. Hope this helps.

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !^on$
RewriteRule (.*) https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Hello,

If the duplicate content is just on about and similar pages, I don't think you will have a problem since as you noted they are different ccTLD and google says they are able to differentiate in those cases.

For your other concern, .eu is a ccTLD, so I don't think you will have an issue since you have multiple ccTLDs and one generic domain.

Hello,

Whichever version of the site you want to display, (www or non-www) I would set this in the google search console as the preferred domain. You may also want to check that in your .htaccess file you have the proper redirects. One to make sure all links are redirected to https and another to make sure all links are redirected to www or non-www, whichever version you have set in the google search console. If different versions of you URL are accessible, this may be why you are seeing these issues.

To be safe and ensure you don't incur a duplicate content penalty, I would re-write the content if possible. Maybe it can be written to be geared more towards a US audience and the AU content more towards an Australian audience as to differentiate them even more.

Hi Alex,

Ah, so something older then? This is where I saw the information. I thought Google was usually pretty good about removing outdated information, but maybe not in this case. I agree, that I have previously only worked with and seen structured data in the body markup, so not sure if this was a more recent development or not.

Thanks for the input!

Hey All,

Was just looking through some google pages on best practices for meta descriptions and came across this little tidbit.

"Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.

"

This is the first time I have seen suggested use of structured data in meta descriptions.  Does this totally replace a regular meta description or will it work in conjunction with the regular meta description? If I provide both structured data and text, will the SERP display text and the structured data the way it was previously displayed? Or will the 150 -160 character limit take precedence and just cut off all info after that?

Hello,

It sounds like you are receiving this error because you have the markup for price in the html, but it is not finding the price so it is showing the error. If you remove the schema markup for the price it will still be valid and should no longer show the error.

We have a similar setup on a client's site of ours. They offer multiple versions of their product in different versions and we do not markup the price using schema, only the ratings and these show up perfectly fine in the SERPS. You can also check Google's Structured Data Testing Tool to aid in schema implementation.

As for a price other then a numerical value, looks like that is possible according to schema.org.

Hi James,

If you can redirect the pages from the old site that are no longer needed, to the same or similar on the new site, then I would do a 301 redirect. You are still sending users to where they are looking to go and will pass along any rankings to the new pages.

In general you don't want 404 pages on your site, so if you have pages that are not relevant on the new site, or if say they are products you do not offer any longer then I would use the GWT URL removal tool and have those pages removed from googles index so they do not come up in search results.

Hope that helps.

Hello,

Not certain, but it looks like a mobile SERP. Looks identical to that on my phone. Maybe your browser just had a hiccup?

Hi Robert,

We use them on a couple client sites, more for security then CDN, but the service worked as advertised and their support was helpful when needed.  Also, it did not conflict with any of the sites functionality. The client has been using the service since late last year and is satisfied as well.

In my experience duplicate content is more about two pages with 100% identical content and different URLs, which is not the case here.  In this case all that is duplicate is a paragraph on the parent page. I would not be concerned with this and as you stated it is necessary information for the consumer.

If you have not read this article on duplicate content already, it may be a good article to get familiar with.

Hello West,

Are there parent pages that are very similar or have the exact same child pages listed? This would be the only thing that I could see as causing a duplicate content warning, and even then it is still just a warning that something may be duplicate. As long as those parent pages do not have the same children listed on them you should be alright IMO.

Hope that helps.

Hard to say if they are taking a 'hit' of any kind. Just from checking Rugs USA, while there is some duplicate content the different product pages are not identical (there are different product titles, images, size options, prices, reviews, etc) so there may not be enough to consider it a 'duplicate content'. To be safe, you always want things like descriptions to be unique, and not duplicate, but that in and of itself may not be enough to draw the duplicate content penalty.

Hello,

Are they different rugs or just a variation of the same rug? If they are different, then ideally yes, each product should have its own description. If they are a variation then you should look to consolidate these pages into one and make the differences into options for that particular rug.

Hope that helps.

Hello,

In general I would agree that placing the blog under some category is ideal, but depending on the type and size of your site I don't think it will make or break the rankings and may not be worth the effort. As you stated you would need to 301 redirect all the posts to the new URL in addition to editing the posts themselves. Make sure your sitemap and canonicals are updated to reflect this change as well.

As for category and tag pages the general rule of thumb is to noindex them but have the pages followed, but there are a few things to consider here. If categories and tags are setup correctly then it would be ok to index them IMO. If posts are only placed on one category then duplicate content will not be an issue. With tags, again if done in moderation then duplicate content should not be an issue as each tag page should display different content. For example say you have a cooking site and you want to tag some recipes. For a vegetarian lasagna some proper tagging may look like. vegetarian, pasta, quick meal. Improper tagging would be, veggie lasagna, lasagna, pasta, vegetarian, vegan. You don't want to create similar tags and too many tags, that is where you can run into duplicate content issues.

As you may be aware there are some great wordpress plugins for setting up these kinds of things. The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the best WP SEO plugins and can help you easily setup the aforementioned items.

Hope that helps.

Hey Raymond,

Thanks for the response, feel like I'm over thinking this a bit, as usually we just leave our opencart setups as is, other then a few minor tweaks. Lately I've really been scrutinizing opencart's SEO setup and how to improve it, since it seems there are a lot of gaps in he way it handles this.

I thought the robots.txt would have been a good way to block the pages, but the issue is I would need to block every single product page as opencart automatically creates a page for every product that is site.com/product and since we are adding lots of products there should be a better way to handle this.  After I posted I came across this tidbit from a 6 year old google webmaster central blog post. Basically it states that 'While we can't guarantee that our algorithms will display that particular URL in search results, it's still helpful for you to indicate your preference by including that URL in your Sitemap. '. I think going this route along with the canonical should do the trick.

Got a quick sitemap question. We have a clients site built in opencart and are getting ready to submit the sitmap. The default sitemap setting generates urls right off of the root. For example site.com/product. These urls are also accessible through the site itself. We prefer to give the site some depth and have structured the products so the urls are site.com/category/product. All of the product pages have canonicals including the category so we should not have to worry about duplicate content on the /product page vs the /category/product page. My question is both types of product pages are included in the sitemap at the moment. Since we don't want google to index the /product urls should we leave them off of the sitemap even though they are readily accessible from the frontend(though not linked)? Or just leave them and let the canonical tag be used in directing google as to which urls to index. Thanks in advance.

Just wanted to chime in. I have been receiving this error too, pretty much all weekend and just got it again.  Maybe Moz is still dealing with the DDoS attacks from yesterday? Any one else seeing this?

Hello,

If you are moving the content to another wordpress install there are plugins that will help make the move easier. You could work on cleaning up the 404s and meta errors before you move the site, but in my experience migrations sometimes to do not bring the content over 'cleanly'. If you can move the content to the new site and work on it before the site is launched, I think that would be ideal. Especially if the URLs are going to be different,  move the content then work on cleaning it all up. It's just easier to do this way IMO since you can see how it will all look beforehand. And yes, depending on the tool you use to aid in the migration, I would try and only bring over good content, not duplicates  and broken pages. Also make sure you get all your redirects in order. If this is a large site that has a lot of traffic, mapping all the redirects to new URLs will be key.

Hope that helps.

Hi Arthur,

Cool feature, very clean and well presented, I'm sure your users will like it.

In terms of SEO, the text content does look a bit thin IMO. From looking at the code it looks like there is more HTML then written content. I would maybe add a some content about this camera comparison tool itself and how it can help users find the right camera they are looking for. Maybe cleanup the URL too as it's not very useful the way it is currently displaying.

Hi David,

I'm guessing you are talking about the review/ratings snippets? You said some are working and some are not, so sounds like they are implemented correctly. I have seen sometimes that a minimum amount of reviews are necessary for the snippet to appear, but have not verified this. Do the products that are appearing have more reviews then ones that are not? Significantly more?  Also, when was the last time, you submitted the product pages to GWT? The page may need to be crawled again to pick up any new reviews.

Hello Joe,

This happens sometimes if you do not set the page crawl limit. Go to Campaigns, then click on your campaign. Click Campaign Settings, and then under Site Basics you will see, Page Crawl Limit. Edit this setting so that it is enough to cover all pages on your site. Once you adjust this, you should have more available page crawls to add more campaigns.

Hope that helps.

This just could be because your blog post is better optimized for that search term as opposed to your product page. Ideally that same blog post on on your website blog would hold that position in the SERP, instead of on blogspot.

Hello,

Have to agree with Richard on this one. You definitely want to have the blog contained within your site, which it looks like you are already doing @ http://www.greatmats.com/blog/. This way links to your content give your site increased authority/juice instead of giving the host site, in this case blogspot.com, any additional authority.

One important thing to note, it looks like you are posting the same content on your site blog that you are posting on your blogspot blog. Google tends to frown upon duplicate content, so you may want to stop using one blog or post different articles on each blog.

The rich snippet testing tool looks to show valid schema markup on the page you sent and the sample link I sent passed html5 validation. At this point looks like certain parts of the schema markup are not recognized by the validator. Good to know this is the case, thanks for sharing the link.

Well the document in question needs to be formatted in HTML5, otherwise it will not validate correctly. So if you run an HTML4 or XHTML page through the HTML5 validator it will not pass. You can also check here to see if the structured data is implemented correctly. Are you able to provide an example of the page you are trying to validate?

Hello,

Are you sure you checked the HTML5 spec? This seems to validate for me and is only basic html5 with schema markup. It's possible you have not marked up the code properly.  Google provides some examples to assist with this. I believe you need to do the full markup too, not just certain parts. Hope that helps.

Hello,

I believe it is valid under the HTML5 doctype, but not others. If you try and validate it under that doctype it clears validation. Generally I think you can ignore this issue for now as shouldn't cause any issues if it does not validate.

Hi Kevin,

I have seen URLs get picked up sometimes by google that are seemingly nowhere to be found. In this case I would setup the 301 redirect. The page being redirected to has the canonical so that tells google this is the correct page to index. The 301 also tells google that the current page being indexed is no longer valid and that it should update the SERP to display the correct page instead. There may be a chance you lose some ranking, but if the content is the same, I would think this is minimal as is stated in this Moz article about redirects and you could probably regain any lost ranking relatively quickly.

Hope this helps.

Hello Oren,

Most of the information I have seen requires some kind of rating number or data in order for reviews to show in the SERP.

If you look at google's guidelines for setting up structured data for an individual review, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146645?hl=en#individual , you will see the 'rating ' is one of the properties. If you set this up without the rating property and then ran it through the rich snippet testing tool you will see an error and therefore the data will not be displayed in the SERP.

Also, in my experience, ratings structured data can be a bit finicky too, if the markup is not 100% accurate, then they do not display.

Hope that helps.

Ah, yes, the product will need reviews before it shows up. In my experience, specifically with rich snippet ratings, they don't usually show up immediately. A couple things can help to get them to appear quicker. Sometimes it seemed that products that had more reviews appeared first. Also, once your markup is correct you can go into Google WMT and resubmit the pages to the index using the 'Fetch As Google' tool. You can also check to see what pages the structured data markup is being found on with the 'Search Appearance > Structured Data' section in Google WMT.

Hello,

If color is the main variation in the products, can you just set those as options, so each color is not a separate page? Then you just have one item and the user just selects a different color from that page. That is really the way this should be done to avoid any duplicate content issues. The other idea would just be to write different content for the pages, which if they are different products, they should already have different content already.

Hope that helps.

Hello,

I don't see the ratings being marked up on the testing tool page.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gourmed.gr%2Fsyntages%2Fpestrofa-sto-tigani-synodeyomeni-me-sauvignon-2003-karypidis

Also the schema category is showing up as 'Attorney'. Seems like your site is cooking related so not sure that this is the correct category. These could both be reasons that your appearance of snippets in the SERPs have changed.

Hello,

As long as the content is not identical then you should not have  any issues with duplicate content. If the same keywords or phrases appear that is alright, but try not to over due it and mix it up as best you can. As for the internal linking, it is ok to link internally, but again, mix it up. Don't use the same keywords in the anchor text over and over, use different phrases and always, make it sound natural. Focus on the content and don't over optimize your pages.

Hi Jenny,

I don't think these tags would have any affect on the SEO. They are formatting tags the same as _or _that only affect the styling of the text they surround and it is unlikely that when crawled they are treated as anything but that. __

Hello,

Yes sounds like you need to redirect to the https: version. One thing to keep in mind though is to also set your preferred domain once the change is complete. Is the new site going to be https://www.domain.com or https://domain.com? Make sure the preferred domain matches this along with any redirects that are setup. It's important to be consistent.

Doesn't sound like GWT is false reporting. May want to check your trailing slash URL rewrite. It seems like there is an issue there as what you are describing sounds like the URLs are being written incorrectly and causing the incorrect URLs to be generated and show up in GWT.

Your 301 looks ok and if the dev site was spidered and indexed, you should just add the site to GWT and then use the URL removal tool to remove the site from the index, then remove the site and redirect.

Appreciate the different responses. Sounds like not much to do but keep an eye on it and see where it goes. May have to disavow a bunch of links, but if that is the worst of it, then not too bad. Thanks!

Hey Everyone,

We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there.

Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites.

Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

Hey Jamie,

Thanks for the response. Yes I agree that the eye test is usually a good barometer for determining the quality of a site and good to hear this applies to directories as well. I'll check out the post, pretty sure I can find it, thanks for the heads up.

Hello All,

Just started to work on a new clients site that has been hit with multiple google penalties. I was looking at their backlink profile and noticed they have numerous links from what seem to be very low quality directory websites. My question is, when building citations and looking for directories to submit to, what makes one directory more credible then another one? If most of them are just publishing links and business information, why does google consider one credible and the other spammy? Clearly with some it's easy to tell if they are credible or not, but with some it is not as easy. Should you only really be submitting to the best of the best or are some lower lever ones ok too? Have read a few things on this topic, but most is older and just want to hear what people have to say on this today. Thanks.

Have been doing SEO for a few years now and have to say that Yoast SEO Plugin does great things to get your site setup and well positioned for SEO, at least in terms on on-page optimization.

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

It gives you a lot of flexibility for managing the SEO on different pages and posts. Sets up sitemaps, open graph tags, will give you recommendations on content in relation to targeted keywords, and helps you setup Google Authorship, just to name a few things. Another thing I like about it, is that it is not overly bloated. It just provides what you need and little else that you don't. You can set all this up yourself, certainly, but the amount of time you save using this plugin is huge and I'm all for that. Would not setup a wordpress build without this plugin.

Hey Remus,

While it doesn't coincide with the exact time that the last algorithm hit, it could be that it just took time to go through the web. I found another post mentioning something on September 17th (http://moz.com/community/q/what-happened-on-september-17-on-google) and this is the exact day we saw the dramatic loss in organic traffic, so it seems that it's possible something has happened on that day if this client is not the only one to run into issues. Also I would kind of seem to go along with what was mentioned as being changed in the new update, in that google is interpreting the results now.

Had something similar happen to a client of ours. On Sept 17 they lost about 85-90% of their organic traffic among all search engines. I mentioned this in a post I added yesterday.

http://moz.com/community/q/loss-of-85-90-of-organic-traffic-within-the-last-2-weeks

Still trying to figure out exactly what happened, but am also curious to see if anyone else ran into similar issues.