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Hi Chuck, I would also look into categorizing your URL parameters in this case: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en as this is inovlving both sorting and categorizing the data on the page it's a good solution to tell Google more about the intent that you have on this page. Martijn.

Definite pros and cons to both it would appear. I don't have the answers to those questions but I will look into this with my developer. You've been a great help Brendan! Thank you for the insights and for your time.

Thanks Gaston. Everything seems to redirect fine, so I guess I need to be patient!

Hello mattl99! You are really fortunate.  You got two 10x responses from Roman and Bob. I'll add just a little...  about.... Your visitors and your niche... If you are selling very simple and common items that everybody uses and knows about then you don't need to write a huge description - just explain the specs.  But, if you are writing about things that involve effort, knowledge and creativity of your visitors to purchase, then you need a lot more than specs.  Items for do-it-yourself projects, items for craft/hobby projects, or the tools, parts and accessories needed for complex goods.  These require a lot more effort and the visitors both need and expect your expertise to help them decide, purchase, use and enjoy.

What a niche, interesting question! You could mean two things here, an on-page snippet that describes the product - or the Meta description which is strictly machine-read and which is used in Google's results (though not as a ranking factor! I'll get to this in a minute) If you mean an on-page description, having duplicate snippets (so long as they are very small) with one changed word or term is not, by itself in isolation - likely to Garner a Google Panda penalty or algorithmic devaluation. If however the description is really the only unique element on the page, you may be at some small to moderate risk of that. But here's the thing - SEO is a competitive environment. Just because you don't get a penalty for not doing the best thing - does that mean you shouldn't do it? If one of your competitors is supplying more in-depth, better, more unique (value-add) information then they will outrank you (so long as their popularity / authority and trust metrics are similar to your own). Small comfort will it be, that you have no penalty - if your results for product URLs suck. Will it matter to you why you aren't getting traffic? Probably not - the commercial outcome could be the same If you mean the Meta description, it probably won't matter very much at all - but let me lay some knowledge on you. Just because Meta descriptions have no special place in Google's ranking algorithm(s) that doesn't mean they can't benefit your SEO. But how can that be!? OK - so it's known that Meta descriptions (well written ones) have an elevated chance of forming SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) snippets in Google's results. If your ranking position contains text which does a better job of compelling a Google user to click through to your website, it stands to reason that writing decent Meta descriptions can make your existing ranking positions supply more traffic and work harder for you (without even shifting). Neat huh? The key of course is that Meta descriptions should be written from a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) perspective and not from a keyword / SEO perspective. So - now you know. Do your best to compete and elevate yourself above others by supplying deeper, value-add (for end users) content on-page. In terms of Meta, CRO makes traffic flow! Hope this was helpful

It could be, it likely depends on if the important keywords are still part of the title. If they're not, then you might have a hard time ranking for it.

Hi John, It would be super helpful to the community if you can share the both the website you're referencing, as well as the exact keyword phrase you're trying to rank for. Also, please let us know if you're aiming for local or organic rankings. Without this information, I'm afraid we can only make random guesses, which aren't going to be helpful to your specific scenario.

The site looks nice on the whole, from just quickly clicking on the link. I can see the Meta Title is the company name and then the search term. Personally I would feature the search term at the start and then the company name after. I would also suggest having some content on the home page above the fold utilising the search term you feel it most important. Using the SEO Moz, Page Grader is a great way of going through and optimising page by page. The main problem personally that I think your going to be faced with is competition. I have this issue a lot when a customer purchases a new website from us. Some people think it's like opening a shop and your going to get a lot of footfall. Once the site is finished, you need to market it like crazy. Or it will be a very slow burn. If I was you, I would add more content through out of the website. Optimise the meta data and important tags across the site, as you have already dealt with speed. Then run some Adwords to get more traffic to the website while the Organic listings build up naturally. It will be very difficult in this type of industry without investing money in a variety of methods of marketing is my personal opinion. I hope it goes well for you.

Thanks for the help, Nicholas!

Great stuff - glad we could help!

Hi Howard Both Joseph and Gaston's tips here are great. Just adding that for backlinks, you could choose a handful of your most authoritative/important backlinks and ask the sites to update the link. It's probably not super needed from a ranking standpoint, but can help Google pick up on the migration signals faster - and I find it's actually a great reason to reach out to sites and reconnect. Definitely update any backlinks you have control over (in social, profiles etc) I definitely recommend following Aleyda's checklist that Gaston linked to.

OK, Paul, I hear what you are saying. It's a very open and obvious diss. I'm not sure what you are saying makes any difference to the argument that the canonical way here is not the way to go. I was explaining in the simplest way, I would not want, and I'm sure you would not want either, a live page like this - the home page, live and canonicalised. (It's a given that the canonical works like a 301, passing link juice to the preferred version.) So thanks but it makes no difference - delete & 301 every time. Google is heightening its distrust of canonicals - the new Seach Console tool reveals which pages are the preferred canonical and it's something of a surprise to SEOs! If you feel like playing top trumps again then why not PM me? - it's so much better and the uninitiated do not need to see it! Cheers Nigel

Simple. If SEO tactics are a part of your scope of services contracted with the client, you need to implement the H1. If not, there's no reason to.

How do I reduce the too many H2's on my blog

Hi All, I will just give you all a quick update. I am more confused then when I first started!! I am telling my team from now if it's on the first page already we don't touch the keyword. Of course other keywords may also be trying to rank for the same page on page 2, so it's going to be a tricky one, I have just done a quick experiment on a ecommerce page the keyword was on page 6, the changes I did yesterday made it go to page 7, further tweaks made it go to page 9!! This is mental! I am using Ryte to make sure semantics are mentioned, maybe using this tool and getting the averages that each keyword and related keyword is mentioned, is not the best idea. But without a guide how do we know what to optimise for? I will give it a week as Nigel above said and see what happens. At least I know resetting to their original values before we started for any keywords that have declined will work. Regards Neil

Thank you Gaston.  Anyone have any input regarding SSL certificates and submitting various url versions to Google Search Console. My certificate is only for a single url so should this be the site that I specify to GSC. Volusion does not allow wild card or multi-site ssl certificates. I'm a little confused as to what is the best way to proceed. The older non secured url version is the one with a long analytics history.

Glad it help

Thank you!

Hi KP There really is no limit but URL's with many hyphens tend to look spammy. Remember the old days of long partial match URLs? www.cheap-car-insurance-for-u.com? and suchlike? They just look really crappy. If you really must use one in the TLD then limit it to one. For Pages & Posts, it's quite common to see more use of hyphens. I'm editor at a music blog and it's quite common to see for example: sitename.com/the-rolling-stones-manchester-live-review It looks natural even though there is a stop word in the URL because 'The' is actually part of the Stones' name You will get a warning in Moz because of the long URL but it will not stop it ranking well, at all! For images, it depends on how descriptive you want it to be. If the image was of Mick Jagger in Manchester then the image URL could easily be sitename**/mick-jagger-manchester-old-trafford** and then the Title or Alt text tag would be 'Mick Jagger - Manchester - Old Trafford, so highly descriptive with a couple of hyphens and great for image SEO. So it's up to you really - the more descriptive the better. Ignore warnings of long URLs unless they are stupidly long and focus on enhancing the ranking of the page rather than worry about minutiae. Now: If you are talking about Meta Titles then it's common to use a variety of separators such as a hyphen (-) or a bar (|). In that case, it's fairly simple as you need Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword - Sitename so they are often limited to just two. I think the more you use them the less space there is for Keywords and it's important with a limited length (60-70 characters) to get those in as a priority. The hyphen takes up 3 characters so they are largely a waste of space. I hope that helps Regards Nigel