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It depends a bit on the topics you're discussing. For most sites, it's very difficult to get ranked on your homepage apart when people are looking for your brandname. If your site is mainly covering one topic - and all the blog post on your site are giving additional info on that specific topic or closely related topic it might work. I would only add additional content on the homepage if it's adding value for the users - it's not really something which is needed for Google (example; when I search for "sports car" on google.co.uk - one of the top results is http://www.classicandsportscar.com/ - which has more or less the same setup as you describe = slider +links to other articles - no specific 'homepage' content)

I'm sure you've gone over this and if so feel free to ignore me but did you make sure your sitemap is up to scratch - https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/184732?hl=en You can also look to see if your data is up to par - https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ You can always work back from the date it stopped working see if you've done anything that may have caused this (some one changing a tag etc.) lastly there is always the giant list of things to check for Google news - http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/the-most-common-google-news-errors/ Best of luck and let us know how you get on.

Glad I could help

great thanks Chris

Thanks for your time, Ryan. I appreciate it.

No manual action. I have seen some fluctuation in rankings, and I am trying to figure out if it is Penguin related. Thanks for the help.

As far as I know site.com and site.com/ are two different pages of the same domain for google. That's why one of the very first thing in any to-do list when setting up a new website is to configure url rewrite to secure only one version is served and the other is redirected.

I do appreciate this kind of honesty. For me, honesty is the only thing that has made me have clients for more than 3 years.

just an update, its seems others have had this issue too.  We have been able to change the 302 to a 301 (magento defaults to 302 by default, this can be changed under configuration, web, url options).  I think the redirect something to do with the "Redirect to CMS-page if Cookies are Disabled", even though its set to "no" its seems its redirecting to the canonical instead. Ultimately I think the solution is under the "Use Categories Path for Product URLs"  which is set to "yes" by default, this make the product urls the same at the canonical (which what google is indexing anyway)

ok thanks for sharing your experience, i appreciate your comments all best dan

Without being able to view stats on the domains in question, it is impossible to give you the best advice. Generally speaking, subfolders get better results than subdomains, but there are many other factors to consider. If you can't move to a subfolder structure, then skip this issue and start down the list of other technical optimization best practices. With time and traffic, I'm sure you'll gain in your organic rankings for selected keywords. In my experience, a domain name is but a small factor of the overall picture. The issues you'll have with these subdomains are more of a marketing cost than an SEO cost.

Don't use canonical tags on your other area pages. If you use canonical tags on your area pages that point back to the main page then you won't be able to rank them, and they won't even get indexed! Only use self-referential canonical tags on your area pages. You're facing a predicament that a lot of Seo's face. Building separate area pages is the most effective way to rank, period. The only exception to this rule is if your domain has huge authority (DA=70+). Then you can rank for different areas with a single page by just mentioning other areas in the page's copy somewhere. The way to rank for other areas is simple....but not easy. You're already going about it the right way. But I also do the following: Ensure the content is 100% unique, or at least 90%+ unique. Change all of the image file names, e.g: new-diaper-cleaning-area.jpg Change all of the image title and alt tags. To do this thoroughly takes a bit longer, but those ranking for the other areas may stick for many years to come, so it's worth the effort. Another secret little tip is to link out to an authority site in that area. So just Google 'Your Area Points of Interest' or 'Your Area Chamber of Commerce' and find the first PR5+ site in the results. Then link to them with a contextual link in the lower half of your page. Good Luck!

FYI, "Google prefers microdata for web content." This was taken directly from their site at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3069489?hl=en "Google is in the process of adding JSON-LD support to more markup-powered features. So far, JSON-LD is supported for all Knowledge Graph features, sitelink search boxes, and Event Rich Snippets; Google recommends the use of JSON-LD for those features. For the remaining Rich Snippets types and breadcrumbs, Google recommends the use of microdata or RDFa." From https://developers.google.com/structured-data/schema-org

Yes it's most definitely a factor in rankings but as you say, to achieve visual perfection on a budget (using a theme and not coding from scratch) you do end up with a lot of code. I always ensure my sites score as high as possible in speed tests, and the Html, Css, and Java are all properly minified (when possible), and that's about all you can do. If the site scores at least a 90/100 in the page speed test then Google are not going to hold back a site that looks good and has great content because it has a lot of code in the site. Most of all that code is for the browsers to render the site correctly but good Seo is mainly dependant on the content contained within certain tags. I just checked one of my sites, and it has 600 lines of code before my H1 tag, thanks to the revolution slider. But the site still ranks top 3 for many keywords and still achieves a 93/100 on page speed test. All things equal, custom built flat html sites will always rank better than themes php template sites, but it's quite rare that all things are equal. Those 400 lines of code may be holding you back by 1 spot or 5 spots, but it's nothing that some good links or great content can't fix. I understand your point though, as it's a painfully slow process to fix that code.

Thanks - i'll give them a call first thing Monday!

Note: I didn't understand your comment that tags should be mutually exclusive. If I have an article about saving money on flowers, why would I not tag that with both "budgeting" and "flowers"? You absolutely would want to tag the article with both "money" and "flowers". Mutually exclusive means there should be no overlap in the meaning of two tags, in this example, "money" and "flowers". Clearly these two tags reference different topics. An example of undifferentiated or non-mutually exclusive tags would be "money" and "cash", or "flower". "flowers" and "flowering". All articles belong to one and only one category, as implied by their URL structure. This creates some challenges because some articles may have some relevance to more than one category but I think I can live with this You could actually replicate the article in more than one category, but you'd have to pick one as the primary and tag the other as canonical. Hopefully this would the exception as opposed to the rule. Am I making sense? Absolutely. Good plan.

Took a quick look at the page, and nothing majorly technical jumped out at me as preventing or hindering page rankings. I always suggest making sure your site's set up in Moz Analytics and looking at the crawl diagnostics, which show a lot of common technical problems. (If you haven't already, of course.) I did notice that on your example, the title tag is too long and Google truncates it. For e-commerce, the big separator between leaders is content. The more you can create unique content about your products -- start with the most important ones -- the better off you will be. Make sure you have unique product descriptions. People love video. And people also love solutions or knowledge about how to use the product and what it will solve for them. You do a great job at listing the specs and features, but what's the value add? A quick look at the competition in the SERPs shows that your competitors, they aren't doing a good at this, and it would set you apart. Additionally, I also noticed that your site in general has a pretty low domain authority, and the product page in question doesn't have any backlinks. These will definitely affect your rankings. Before jumping on building links, I highly suggest reading our beginner's guide to link building, which will walk you through the pros, cons, and best practices to build links as you don't want to get into trouble with Google over links.

Hi Ryan. Thanks for your response. I understand that the translated pages don't need canonical tags, but I am wondering that since the parameter pages may cause duplicate content, should I add a canonical tag pointing to the non-parameter page? Also, I have heard conflicting views on whether or not the pages need a self referencing hreflang tag. Thanks! Kyle

Thanks for your input Hutch. Both incidents you described have occured already. I'm on top of it but my developer seems lost.

Hi Jason, It depends on what CMS you're using.  If you're using WordPress, you can definitely use SEO Yoast or any other plugins to change the meta title and many other SEO required areas.  Please let us know what CMS you're using to further help. Can you clarify your 2nd question? Thank you!