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Hi, im a little lost on what you mean but a 404 is essentially a none page it doesn't exists so it would need nor have a canonical unless perhaps to its self if you have a fixed 404 page. you may 301 a url that was a 404 page to a 200 page but then it wouldnt be a 404 so its a bit of a paradox!

This has not yet been sorted.

Your welcome I hope that helps you some.

Thanks everyone.  I really appreciate the time and effort each of you spent helping a newbie.  I will stop using them completely.

A lot of e-commerce solutions don't really give you much scope (out of the box) to add a great deal of text content to the product category pages but I can assure you, it's well worth the effort to do so as that copy can make all the difference to your rankings. A fair percentage of your traffic is likely to arrive from top/mid-funnel searches such as 'dining room chairs', for example, and having a paragraph of text, which gives a quick overview of the product range, gives you an opportunity to include the keyword in copy AND  provide further information about the products and service you offer in relation to this product, should they require it. After all, we can skim/skip the copy if it's present and start viewing the products themselves, but give people the choice. Personally, I'd want to show at least some introductory copy on a category page as I've seen the benefits it can deliver (and the detriment of not having any present on the page). If you are able to deliver your potential customers directly to a page which shows off a representative cross-section of products which match their search then you stand a chance of converting them into actual customers. Yes, you could have a separate landing page for 'living room chairs' and then provide a link to the product category but that's effort and gives the visitor another opportunity to go elsewhere. Show them what they want as quickly as possible and the best way I've found to do that (when dealing with product categories similar to this) is with additional copy around the product content.

Thanks, helps a lot.

These kinds of named anchor links have no effect on SEO, fortunately. Google crawlers ignore the anchor variable altogether. Make sure you have correct canonical tags on each page just for extra insurance. Paul

** redirected with a 301 in order to do not lost keyword rankings?** If you redirect, you are probably going to lose most of those rankings and traffic because those pages do not exist on your site anymore and it was the pages that qualified you to appear in the SERPs for those keywords and the content that earned your rankings. If those keywords and their traffic are still important for you, then create a new page with a new article that suits you, optimized for those important keywords and redirect there.  A better way would be to simply post new content on the currently existing page.   Those are the best ways to hold traffic when you don't want to continue with certain content. We have often changed our mind about content and done complete rewrites in the original URL.  Works great.

Excellent. I have to say, the number of schema they offer is bewildering. Glad to hear you're sorted.

While I do often look at Domain Authority, I see a LOT of cases where DA doesn't tell the whole story. DA is Moz's best replication of PageRank. But, because no one outside of Google knows how they calculate PageRank, it's not always going to be equivalent. There are a lot more things that could be done for this site, especially in terms of on-page SEO. The home page title tag is "Home | Brand" It's quite important to have some keywords in the title tag. Similarly, take a look at the above the fold content of the home page. I see an image (logo), followed by some navigational buttons and then the most important text on the page says: Real Experience. Practical Solutions. When Decisions Matter. Below that are a few buttons that do actually contain some keywords. My point is that there is very little on your home page that gives Google the context of what you want this site to rank for. I am betting that changing the title tag and writing some above the fold text that concisely explains what the firm offers and also contains a few keywords would make a difference. Those were just a few things I saw on a quick look. It might be worthwhile to do a thorough site quality audit as a next move. On-site changes can really help move the needle.

I agree that it isn't necessary but I wouldn't automatically consider it spammy, either. (The content will determine that far more than the URL structure). Considering the URL structure as above will not make the site look spammy. Consider a www.myshoeshop.com/womens-shoes/  /mens-shoes/ /boys-shoes/ /girls-shoes/ It is relevant (i.e.) the page in question deals in mens shoes etc. All you have done is indicate to the visitor that this page relates to their search; no harm in that. When you use the On-page grader: https://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader, one of the considerations is keyword in URL so it's expected. One page for one keyword is still common practice (though Google's introduction of Rankbrain will see this diminish over time: https://moz.com/blog/optimizing-for-rankbrain-whiteboard-friday) and we will need to evolve our content and thinking in alignment with this. You could, of course simply use mycouponsitename.com/walmart etc.  as you allude to in your statement. I'd worry less about the URL structure and more about the content as here's plenty of scope to make this look spammy, depending on how you deliver the content. Deliver relevance and engaging content, don't bombard me with ads and, most importantly perhaps, provide COUPONS THAT ACTUALLY WORK and you will have delivered a great user experience. Your/the clients revisit rate will go up and people will spread the joy, regardless of the URL structure.

Yes, I am aware of the fact, that OSE lags behind Google. But I don't see the reason why Google ranks one page higher than the other...

Hello I am fairly new to the community but I thought I could offer some useful information. I have had similar issues and success with a number of techniques (though probably on a smaller scale). I was about to list them when I remembered there was a great whiteboard Friday on this topic. https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday Degrading a page might not be worth it if your competitors are hot on your heels. Especially if you have yet to do everything you can to improve the rank for www.domain.com. I have never tried such things across domains so I would be interested to know how you get on. I appreciate you want to give power to your product domain and not simply shine a light on one over the other. You might consider a redirect. I believe 301s now pass all of the link juice. If there is another way to transfer power other than internal link sculpting I would love to know also. Alex

Thanks very much! Appreciate your thought and insight.

Hi AdvertisingCloud - Thanks for your question. It's definitely one that gets asked pretty often. Honestly, you should do what is right for the user. Do you have multiple of the keyword (eg widgets) and not just one (eg widget)? If so, use the multiple because it's what the user who is looking for multiples will want to see. If the latter, use the singular. If you're really concerned about losing rankings, build more good links. That'll help out across the board with your rankings. Hope that helps! John

of course! so my recommendation would be to inspect the page (with chrome dev tools) and see if it is styled as an H1, and if it isn't styled as a true H1, I would add that as a task to your backlog but I wouldn't suggest that you make it higher priority then other more important ranking factors. That being said, most of these SEO best practice recommendations come from people doing tests and identifying trends, so there is no 100% solid answer that "yes you NEED it to be styled as a true H1" or "no it does not matter at all". My personal opinion is that it still carries some value, so if you can figure it out, I would recommend that you do have it read as a true H1 tag. Even if it does not impact your rankings significantly, I think that your site will be better off following all recommended best practices.

Hi Dmitrii, Thanks, yeah we have canonicals which are self-referencing for products, so I will need to find out if we are able to manually change it on one URL. The content on both pages is identical, which isn't great for SEO, I know. We sell a lot of (15k+) products and have one person writing product descriptions so we aren't always able to make sure the content is unique (although we do write our own descriptions, not copying the ones provided by suppliers). For the websites as a whole, the product descriptions on the microsite (where we sell about 30 products) are probably all either identical or extremely similar to the main website, but all other content is unique and of course the main website has lots more content that is unique to it, so there is just a small overlap, but for the page in question, it is probably 99% duplicate. Personally, I'd be happy if just the microsite ranked for the keyword, but will need to discuss internally whether we want to put in the extra effort of making all product descriptions unique on the microsite. As for relevant links, I think the microsite should have more, as it generally performs much better for keywords related specifically to its niche (which is why I don't like that it's not ranking at all for this keyword just now). Thanks again.

Thanks for the answer Brett. I guess I was going off old information and maybe confused between page rank and anchor text. Matt Cutts said: "last time he looked, which was in 2009, they only counted the anchor text from the first link." which makes me think I must have heard it quite a while ago. Source: (http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718), although the video is not working for me so I can't double check exactly what he says here. But anyway, many thanks. Extremely useful information for me