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Thanks Lewis.

Yes that is what I thought. We don't manage their website in terms of development so this may be out of the question. I will check if the colours are conflicting in any way first. If this fails I think you are correct in that they will need to make the content more unique.

Tricky one isn't it as it is JUST the colour that changes, the products are exactly the same.

Many thanks

Hi there,

We are currently doing an SEO audit of an ecommerce website and we ar eunsure on the best practice in terms of using canonical link tag for some product variations.

An example is that the company has a product with two colour variations: Black and Tan. These are for the same product and have 99% the same content. Within the content of the page the colour is the only thing that changes (along with the meta information and imagery of course).

My question is should we choose one product and canonically link back to that one i.e. Black is the main product and we link Tan back to this via a canonical link?

Many thanks in advance.

Hi Guys

Thanks for the quick response.  Okay, having read through the links and other resources on hreflang="x" and how to implement it I have a couple of follow up questions if you don't mind.

Question 1:
Using http://www.abercrombiekids.com as an example which I found, the source of their homepage has many alternate links to other sub domains or ccTLD's. The idea here I presume is that it notifies the search engine where alternative versions of the same content can be found  (even though that some of the content presumably is in a different language which I find strange...). So the idea of this is then for Google to index those alternate webpages but assign them to the www.google.?? search engine somehow?

Question 2:
In my site homepage for the .CO.UK site, I would have 1 alternate href as "x-default" (for the .co.uk domain) and then 2 alternate hrefs to the homepages of the USA site and the Australian site.  And this process would change depending on which site I am looking at i.e. the USA site would set itself as the "x-default" and link to the other 2 domains as alternates - is that correct?

Question 3:
Finally, do I need to apply this methodology to EVERY page on all 3 sites indicating which is the default and which is alternate?

Kind regards and appreciation for your feedback.
Kris

Hi

We have a client who wishes to have a site created and duplicated onto 3 servers hosted in three different countries.

United Kingdom, Australia and USA. All of which will ofcourse be in the English language.

A long story short, the website will provide the user 3 options on the homepage asking them which "country site" they wish to view. (I know I can detect the user IP and autoredirect but this is not what they want) Once they choose an option it will direct the user to the appropriate ccTLD.  Now the client wants the same information to appear on all 3 sites with some slight variations in products available and English/US spelling difference but for the most part, the sites will look the same with the same content on each page.

So my question is, will these 3 sites been seen as duplicates of each other even though they are hosted in different countries and are on ccTLD's?

Are there any considerations I should pass onto the client with this approach?

Many thanks for reading.
Kris

Hi Tony

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question.

I take on board your comments regarding the top level menu structure, I will discuss this with my designer and see how we can get this to work.

Regarding the noindex of the "Air Filters" landing pages for example, the reason why I thought this would be applicable (in my original structure plan)  is largely due to the fact that the page content (i.e. the products listed in here) will be for the most part a collection of the products listed across my additional "Audi Air Filters" and "Ford Air Filters" pages so would this not be content canonicalization? I thought noindexing the "Air Filters" landing pages would be the correct thing to do?
Thanks.
Kris

Hi all,

As the title says, I am redeveloping a website for a client who sells car parts. The market is saturated with competition and 9 times out of 10, www.eurocarparts.com appears within the top 5 SERPS when searching for the same things that my clients' website sells. Now I know it will be very difficult to compete with the likes of these sites but given time (plenty of time) you never know so I have dissected Euro Car Parts website for many hours to look at their internal link structure and so my question is related to this area.

My site only sells car parts for 4 car manufacturers.

The left hand "shop" navigation menu will list the categories in which the shop sells products for e.g:

Air Filters
Break Pads
Coilovers
Dampers
Suspension etc.

When you view one of those pages, there will be a form to allow the user to filter down to their particular make/model of car etc.

Now when I search for "Air Filters" in Google, the results come back as nearly 40 million. If I prefix that search term with a car manufacturer name i.e. "Audi Air Filters" the number drops down to 8 million - quite a difference!
So my thinking was to do the following but I wanted to see if you guys think I am barking up the wrong tree or if this is a good approach:

Create pages for my 4 car manufacturers for each "shop category" listing all the products I have in those categories for the manufacturer along with well written unique, relevant content, ie:-

Audi Air Filters
Audi Break Pads
Audi Coilovers
Audi Suspension

... this would allow me to target the slightly long-tailed version of "Air Filters" as I now have a page for "Audi Air Filters".

This would then mean when users click the "Air Filters" link from my left hand category menu, I would need to ensure that those pages were not indexed by the search engines as they would essentially be showing the same subset of products but with the title of the page being "Air Filters".

I hope I have explained myself enough for you to understand my question.

Ultimately I want to know if my approach is a typical one when knowing that even attempting to target "air filters" with a new website is going to be a lost cause - I need to try and get some of the lower hanging fruit.

Thank you for reading.

Hi

I have a website which is mostly dynamic content from a database. In the header of the site I have a function which outputs the rel="canonical" link and in some cases the canonical is the page the user is visiting and not another page on the site but I still show it in the source.

However we have just recently launched our mobile website which is stored on an M DOT domain (i.e. m.mydomain.com) which has different URL's to my main website so following Google's recommendations we have created rel="alternate" links on my desktop site to point to the equivalent mobile pages and on the mobile pages I have created rel="canonical" links which point back to the relevant desktop site keeping everything tidy.
My question is, is there an issue with having both a rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" in the source of of a single page on my desktop site?  Is it conflicting or detrimental in anyway?

Thanks for reading

The key is to make sure your website growth, authority and success is natural.

I have personally witnessed a client who has tried to "get to number one in Google" by rushing into activities of obtaining vast numbers of inbound links and ultimately they logged into GWT one day to see a nice message from Google notifying them of the suspicious activity.

Keep things simple. Start with fixing any errors within the HTML by running your site through the WC3 validator. I can see you have 8 errors on the homepage.  Easily fixable.  Then run your site the Y-Slow browser add-on.  The page loading time is taken into consideration with search engines.  You are currently getting a Grade C - see if you can improve this somewhat.

One thing at a time. Oh and remember, its no longer about "being number 1" so much now, its about measuring your goals and conversion rates and determining success that way.  Stick some kind of track_pageview onto the "start test" button, then you can compare how many people visit your homepage and also compare how many actually ran the speed test system.  The fact that the speed test is the main function of your site suggests you should see that the number of visitors to your homepage should not be too disimilar to the number of people who run the test.  If there is a big difference, find out why.  Good luck.

I got 9mb per second by the way.

Hi Wardy

A quick check on opensiteexplorer comparing your site and the number 1 current ranking [<cite>broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk</cite>], the results show a huge difference in inbound links, page authority, domain authority and social activity to name a few.

You said so yourself that your domain is only 12 months old.  Doing a quick search on Google.co.uk indicates that there are about 23,600,000 results for the search phrase "broadband speed test". Fairly saturated market but time will hopefully allow you to improve.

The fact that your site is at the number 10 position is not bad in my opinion for such a young domain.  Get your new site uploaded with 301 redirects in place and review it after the new site is up and running.

Hi all
I have read a few post that are similar to mine on this forum but still wanted to ask my specific question.

We have a .com domain hosted on a dedicated server in the UK for our main website which takes online bookings and payments. We have purchased the following TLD's of our domain name:
.it, .es, .ch, .fr, .es, .at

We essentially want to create a satellite site on each domain where the idea is that users in those countries will find our satellite sites via organic search engine results when searching for the information we sell. Due to the nature of our infrastructure, each satellite site will connect to the mysql database on the UK site to drawn down its text content.  This is where the main CMS is located.

I understand the following are important from an SEO point of view for our satellite sites:

Hosting in the country we wish to target
Geographical targeting via WMT
Local addresses and telephone numbers on the site
Correct lang=" " tag in the source code
Content presented in the correct language (goes without saying really)

Can you advise on any other considerations?

Many Thanks

Kris

Hi Wardy

A quick check on opensiteexplorer comparing your site and the number 1 current ranking [<cite>broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk</cite>], the results show a huge difference in inbound links, page authority, domain authority and social activity to name a few.

You said so yourself that your domain is only 12 months old.  Doing a quick search on Google.co.uk indicates that there are about 23,600,000 results for the search phrase "broadband speed test". Fairly saturated market but time will hopefully allow you to improve.

The fact that your site is at the number 10 position is not bad in my opinion for such a young domain.  Get your new site uploaded with 301 redirects in place and review it after the new site is up and running.