Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No clear answer to that question. I would review why and where google is pulling the information from.  Then try and track down the issue from there. Here is a great article on it which goes into a deep dive.  https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description Hope that assists.

Don't second-guess on that myth that scrapers can't hurt you.  These guys are outranking you right now with your own content.  Proof enough to me that Kissmetrics needs to take notice and pull down false information.  Also, this is another clear example of Google not knowing how poorly their systsem is working and they know not that they know not. Google would not be getting millions of DMCAs per week if they were right about this.  I've sent them hundreds.

In your sitemap you only have to link to the pages on your site - there is no need to add a link to the robots.txt file. Your robots.txt is always on the root of the domain (yourdomain.com/robots.txt). In your robots.txt you can put the location of your sitemap(s) - just put the following line(s) at the end of the file. It is possible to add multiple lines if you have multiple sitemaps. Alternative would be to put a link to the index type of sitemap which contains the links to the different sitemaps you have. Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/name_of_your_sitemap.xml It is not strictly necessary to add the link to the sitemap in your robots.txt - you can also just indicate the location in the Search Console (Google) / Web master tools (Bing) Dirk

Hi Laura and Everett Thank you for your responses. I had a read of those articles and completely agree regarding the product descriptions. Since I do want to rank for each individual track, I can't afford to use a drop-down menu as ideal as that would be. Time to get writing. Thank you!

It's not likely to be a penalty, but it's also not proper use of the tag. Personally, I'd want to change it.

Nah moz is smart enough to auto detect the changes and adjust accordingly. Make sure all your 301 redirect are in place and over a week or 2 moz should begin listing the https as google index's then and replaces your http.

1) Analytics data is based on the UA code on the page. Assuming your pages are built on a template, by default the UA code for yyy.com is going to receive the visit, not yours. You could ask them to put your UA code on there but... that kind fo defeats the purpose of having analytics in the first place when you're blurring the data! 2) From a user perspective, it would be a little confusing to click a top nav link and end up on another website, so yeah I would suggest putting that link somewhere else on the site and making it clear that they're about to leave yours. Bonus points for using target="_blank" to open that other page in a new tab, also for user experience. **3) **Right again. If yyy.com has nothing to do with xxx.com (as in the owners of X and Y don't even know each other) then it's a very strange request and one I'd be hesitant to even entertain. The quality of their site can hurt you to a minor extent, I'd just be more worried about the confusing user experience and the fact that you'd be electively sending your users to their site, while they offer you... what? The reason they want that link up there is simply the implied strength of that location. Link value is typically seen in order of priority from top left to bottom right; a link in your top nav gives them a sitewide link from almost the very top of every page. Good for them I suppose, though sitewide links aren't great, but not something you should do.

Yes it can definitely hurt your rankings as it will give a signal to Google that the page is indeed somewhere else and for a homepage that is usually not the case. I would to try to get rid of the canonical URL if that indeed is the way to go.

The team from Giovatto is correct, you can click on the url and see where it is being linked from. gwtapi4.png

The url without a slash seems to be the default now, while url with a slash redirects to one without, only for homepage. all other subpages have slashes as preferred and no matter what result in trailing slash, which is a major thing I wanted. Thank you, am looking into things further via a Bigcommerce post on their forums, however I'm not holding my breath as some responses can take a good bit, since there is a ocean of users seeking responses as well.

Hi, It sounds like you might need to implement hreflang tags. Have you done so already? Without being able to specify each country-level shop in Search Console via ccTLD, this is your best bet to ensure the right pages show in the right versions of Google. Here's Moz's guide to using hreflang tags. For each of your country-specific subdirectories, you'll need to add the appropriate tag which will specify the country and language of the page. This helps keep Swiss pages out of Google.de, etc, etc.

When you say 138 links I'm going to assume your site has 138 pages and only 43 pages are being indexed. If not, let me know. Have you submitted an XML sitemap with all 138 pages? If you have and still only 43 are being indexed, I'd take a look at the quality of your pages. If you have several pages that have similar or duplicate content, Google may decide to index only one. Also, make sure all 138 pages are easy to navigate to from either the nav bar or an HTML sitemap (or both). If all else fails, try the Fetch as Google tool within Search Console to submit your non indexed pages and then click submit to index. I usually find this rarely does anything, but it's worth a shot.

I'm having this same issue with a new drupal site. Does anyone know the underlying cause and how to fix it. Would any relative path cause this? Thanks.

Hi Endre! If you haven't you may want to try running a _full _SERP report on those terms using the blue button in the upper-right of that screenshot. It compares a lot more ranking factors, and might give you a better idea of what's going of.

Some of your pages lack enough content or unique content for Google to care: This: http://carpetcleanertn.com/carpet-cleaning-specials/ isn't indexed. But then, why would it be? http://carpetcleanertn.com/carpet-cleaning-spring-hill-tn/ this isn't indexed - but ... yeah. No content except an image on this either: http://carpetcleanertn.com/gift-certificates/ None at all here: http://carpetcleanertn.com/great-nashville-area/ Your pricing & services page aren't being indexed but that's because they're near-copies of the actual chemdry page. See attachment. I think if you wrote clean, new copy for the pricing & services page you'd see them get indexed but since they're super-close to the original, Google has chosen to only index one. vLWyTlO.jpg

In that case, you'd need to add the robots meta tag at the page level before the tag. or

Hello Logan, Great thank you for getting back to me. I have gone through and created 410 redirects for all the old content. I guess only time will tell if this is the write solution. Regards Rob

Hi Kerry, If you use 301, then the no index no follow rule will never be read. That is because as soon as the page is requested the server redirects, in such case the meta rule tags in the html are never read. So in short I wouldn't worry about it if you're 301'ing. You should however make sure you update any sitemaps you maybe using and change your internal linking to use the new url opposed to the old. You don't want your site to continue to link to a page that just gets 301 redirected by the server. That is just good practice. Hope this helps, Don

Sounds like you've got a solid plan! Good luck, and make sure to let your boss and coworkers know that you will almost definitely see a temporary decrease in organic traffic through this process. It doesn't mean that you've ruined it, just that Google needs to adjust. Good luck!

Great question John. If I'm understanding your question correctly, you want to know how to specifically fix the 404 errors with parameters that are appearing in your GSC account? Parameters are very useful if used correctly, but I want to make sure I'm understanding your question completely before answering. What exactly are you trying to solve?