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Thanks, That is a great response Roman, I'll go through those links and study them.

Hi there - The simplest thing to do is to: choose a url variant (either with or without /) and apply it consistently across the site. say you choose the "without /" version. Redirect all "with /" versions to the without version. make sure the rel=canonical of each page points to the variant you choose (either the with or without traling slash variant). when linking to a page on your site (from a banner for example) try to link to the variant you choose, otherwise Googlebot has to follow a url redirect unnecessarily, which is an inefficient use of your crawl budget. I hope this is clear. Thanks!

Hello Hijabgem, You should NOT have more than one Rel = "Canonical" tag per page. However, as is the case with the page below, if the tag is the same URL in both instances on the page it probably isn't going to cause any problems: | rel="canonical" href="https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html" /> | |   | rel="stylesheet" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.2.0/css/font-awesome.min.css" /> | |   | rel="canonical" href="https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html" /> |

thanks for your answer. Very helpful. Yes your comments do make sense and had thought about that. I am going to test a few category pages before I roll it across the whole site. Thanks again.

Thanks Paul, Agreed. Its for the hero image only on the home page and I'm in discussions with the theme provider to see if there's a way to have only one H1 tag, but have the image change behind it as you move between devices. We'll see how I get on with that! Thanks for your help it's greatly appreciated! Mike.

Have you seen any further improvement on the indexing front, Cat? Paul

Thanks Gaston, I've heard it both ways

Thank you for the quick responses.

Yes correct the blog is site.com/blog and has high quality content with many high ranking pages and high quality score. I will clean it up and try to maintain it again as the blog has not been looked after for a while and can be a good source for extra traffic. Many thanks for all comments it really helps!

I doubt that you can get a definitive answer from a non-googler (and googlers' non-disclosure agreements sometimes make them fairly closed-mouthed), this will depend on how fast the new content is indexed and how soon after that the indexed results get processed by Google's ranking algorithm. To get the fastest results 1) resubmit changed pages for indexing right after they are changed. The only other things you can do is 2) don't limit Googlebot's crawl rate or, if it has been limited, fix that. 3) don't limit (in robots.txt, etc.) what you allow googlebot to crawl. (Who would do that? I did, after watching googlebot crawl some wp folders where I felt it had no business.  Corrected that fairly quickly.) Generally, I see an effect on SERPs fairly quickly - a day or 3. However, if you are in a very competitive market, there's always that brownian motion caused by what your competition does...:)

Thanks and good luck!

Hey Paul - Xenu took a couple of tries as it found so many links it crashed at first, but when I told it to ignore external links, it was able to spit out not only all the broken images but also broken and redirected links, which I'd also like to fix. Thanks for the great solution!

In an ideal world, you would have unique content everywhere - category, subcategory, product detail page, etc. Of course, that requires a lot of effort to maintain. So I think the answer really depends on your goals and your stats. I would personally check my analytics to find patterns. First, I'd determine what level most organic traffic ends up landing on. Do they all land on your homepage? Do most of them end up on product detail pages because your long tail is better optimized? Are there higher level categories that seem to do the best? This will give you an idea of what is currently working for you as far as SEO, so you can begin to answer questions like, does the long form content in the footer help drive organic traffic at all for your particular website? Next, I would check analytics to find out: only for organic traffic, what content levels did people see before they bought a product? I would assume that in most cases they need to hit the individual product detail page to add to cart, since they must select a size etc. - but depending on your site, maybe lots of people do a Quick View and add to cart from a modal, etc. Find out what your organic visitors are looking at to figure out which level - category, subcategory, sub-sub-category, product detail, etc. - the largest portion of organic visitors who actually bought something visited. Finally, I would check analytics to find out only for non-organic traffic, what content levels did people see before they bought a product? Perhaps you're running some successful marketing campaigns, and these folks land straight on a particular sweet spot that organic folks aren't finding, and because the marketed-to visitors see exactly the information they need, they're buying more. This will also be helpful in determining what levels of pages to optimize. Once you've determined what levels are converting best, set those as your priorities for unique content and driving traffic. Unfortunately, e-commerce is a tough market to be in as far as SEO and content. There are so many distributors out there that to really compete organically you need an edge. The good news is, if you're doing the work to differentiate yourself enough to earn better organic rankings and gain visitors, you should also reap the benefits of the visitors themselves having a better user experience and becoming more likely to actually convert.

Hey Ed, thanks for clarifying this.

Totally agree! Rand's post explains this really well

Makes perfect sense. Thanks a lot. Just the type of feedback I was looking for.