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Well - this is easy win. But you need to ask yourself - should you put products in homepage? In Woo you can easy duplicate /shop page with / (homepage). And when i go in some site i want to know about their company, best (best-of-best) products, etc. This is huge niche for A/B tests. For example - you can put some promo on some products and drive traffic to them. Or company innovation, or company news, etc. Imagine Amazon (just example) if you visit them did you get ALL of their billion products on their homepage? Or if you visit newspaper did you get ALL their news on their homepage? Only change between /shop and / is one image in homepage in ATF. So - yes, you can canonical them, but then you will miss much better opportunity in CTR or CRO.

Yes! I have tested them in this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ip03xNfpwg CTR was 6.36% and closes are 9.09%. I know that they're not "best-of-best" annotations, but definitely helps. But video is strange because have long intro and one of note is for jump inside of video where action begins. I'm trying to implement also "cards" in YouTube videos to see their performance too.

I would agree with Dirk. There is not much to rank for on your website, all of your content comes from amazon. Still, another questions is why is it not indexed yet. The website is built on Wordpress and if you haven't touched your robots.txt then it should not block crawlers. As I can see you are not ranking for your exact match domain name (i.e. site: yourdomain.com) which can be sign of a manual penalty. What I would suggest is to add some content, do some internal optimisation (download seo Yoast plugin), add Titles, H1, optimise images and so forth. Then, create a separate search console account and submit your sitemap and see if it works.

Hi again Dirk, One last question. What if we got the variations to work with our shipping demands.. Would the absolute best solution to have a single product page, with variations.. And the canonical urls for the variations that woocommerce creates set to the main product page? In that case i would be able to get better content for the main product page and hopefully it will rank higher and stand stronger against competitors. Also it would limit the duplicate content that we have today? If i follow this solutions i would need to set up 301 redirects for the old product pages right? Thanks! / Jonas

There isn't a direct penalty for having rel="canonical" tags on every page, no, as long as you are correctly utilizing them (i.e. don't set the href of the tag to an invalid or non-existent URL). If there is even the possibility of duplicate content on your website, it is best to use canonical tags. For websites serving straight HTML files, both _http://www.example.com/index.html_ and _http://www.example.com/_ likely serve the same content. If you use a framework like ASP.NET MVC, it would by default return duplicate content for both _http://www.example.com/_ and _http://www.example.com/Home/Index_. Choose one or the other and set your canonical tag to that: (note: the trailing slash is optional - just be consistent with including it or not)

Thanks for the info. In my books a 301 redirect is for a direct replacement of an old webpage for a new one. I knew a bunch of 404 errors would be problematic, but I was also worried setting up 301 redirects to the home page (which is not a replacement for the product page being removed) would not agree with best practices. Also good point regarding existing incoming links pointing to the pages being removed. I think what we'll do is export URLs from the Google index, and either set a 301 redirect to the new product page (if it exists) or if not we'll 301 redirect to that product's category page.

Hi Ruth, Appreciate your response. Trying to get these sorted at a code level, but we currently have six different issues all providing various issues, along with a variety of other features not working correctly. (The joys of working with a 10 year old system that is behind in a few areas) You say the following: Make sure that the pages your canonical tags point to are very similar to the pages the tags are on - if they're too different, Google may decide they both need to be indexed. Is it strange that the canonicals that are not the exact duplicates (category filters on ecommerce) are the main ones that are obeyed, the product canonicals (with exact duplicates, excluding changes to the breadcrumbs) are the ones being ignored. There are pages that are receiving search traffic, but not a massive amount (atleast compared to the true versions of these pages, some of these pages get 10s to 100s of clicks, the canonical pages get thousands/tens of thousands) Would a viable strategy to try and deal with these by redirecting these non-canonical urls to their canonical format? (short term until we can get issues sorted) Final query, if Google ignores the canonical is this potentially going to be penalising us? If the answer is believed to be yes then it'll be a higher priority item to deal with.

Guys, Thank you very much. I really did appreciate the fast response and it did help me clear a few doubts and misconceptions. Koki

Hi there Google does offer methods on getting your website listed in Google News. I would offer the following resources: Google News Publisher Center Creating a Google News Sitemap Enabling Rich Snippets for Articles I would take a look at your website, make sure the content is there in the way that it is worth being listed, read Google's guidelines, and see what from the above you can get started on. These methods should help get you noticed and possibly listed, but as always, it's up to Google! Hope this helps! Good luck!

I did a site command for your site and Google returned 54,100 results. I then clicked on a couple of the results that caught my eye cause they contained the word "banner": www.yellowpages.com.lb/actions/redirectbanner/883 www.yellowpages.com.lb/actions/redirectbanner/702 Both those pages immediately redirect you to another site. It looks like you're indexing all images on the site. You should probably only index the page on which the images reside. You're doing a ton of internal 302 redirects. Are all those needed? Why 302s? 302's don't pass search equity. Your indexing might be getting cut short b/c Google is being channeled elsewhere or distracted indexing content it doesn't need to.

Hi Tormar! I agree with Gaston—the subdomain will be seen as a separate domain, so you should really just optimize it as you would any other domain. Is there anything more specific you're looking for, here?

Looking at Wayback, there have been development changes to the site - some of this included dropping H2 tags and replacing with spans for titles, removing internal links. The drop will most likely be related to content/structure changes.

Great, Peter. Thanks for the answers. I now understand the difference. Much appreciated.

Hi, It seems like that you would have to go with the first option of No. Sometimes certain parameters indeed don't have any affect on the pages, like tracking parameters or other ones that might send some referral information. Martijn.

Hi Nikos, It's important to remember that Keyword Difficulty scores are a Moz metric, not a Google metric - they are based on Moz' ability to judge how well other sites are competing for that term, and may not capture the entire competitive landscape (since nobody except Google knows everything that Google looks at). Based on your ability to rank well for some terms and not others, it doesn't seem likely to me that you are under any sort of penalty, so much as that Google just isn't ranking you for some terms. In addition to the Keyword Difficulty scores for each term, take a look at which sites rank for the term (you can do this in the SERP Analysis feature of the Keyword Difficulty tool. Ask youself: What kinds of sites rank for this term? For example, if you are an individual business, but all of the sites and pages that are ranking for that term are aggregators or lists of multiple sites, it may be that Google has determined that an individual business site is not a good fit for that query. Similarly, if your page is a blog post and no other blog posts appear in the SERP, Google may have decided that a blog post isn't what people are looking for when they search that term. What is the search intent of the query? Based on the other pages that rank, what is the question or task that Google has decided users are trying to answer or complete when they search this term? Does your page do a better example of helping answer that question or complete that task than the other pages that rank? What types of content are ranking? Do they all have rich snippets? Are there images, video, shopping or maps results? All of these will tell you more about the kind of content Google thinks will match this query. Is there a specific page or website that is ranking for that term that you think you could push out of the top 10? Look for areas of opportunity. For example, maybe there is a site with high authority, but the page that ranks has very low page authority and doesn't fit the query very well. Try to create a page that is better than that page, specifically. How closely is the phrase related to your niche? You can tell from the keywords you are successfully ranking for, which topic areas Google is associating with your site. If you have a whole site about chocolates, it will be harder to rank a page about asparagus, even if the difficulty score is lower. Also, don't forget to continue promoting your content to earn high-authority links to individual content pieces. Where it makes sense to do so, you may also want to link internally from some of your more popular and successful pages to some of the pages that are struggling. I hope that helps!

An experienced SEO will understand both the things you're talking about, but also technical elements that influence site performance (from a user and search engine perspective). If you want to learn everything yourself and handle it yourself, that's fine but if you've got a business to run you need to really look at the opportunity cost of that. If you're really getting fed up with SEO companies not performing when you pay a large sum, why not hire someone in house to take care of that work? You kind of need to define what your business really needs, then find a company that truly specializes in that. Choosing any general agency may not yield the best results, especially if all they do is an audit and change a few onsite elements. If you're pretty much set onsite after working with a few companies, then find help with content development and outreach. Make content and resources that are useful for your potential customers, which will help funnel them into a sales page to convert into a paying customer. If you're just looking for recommendations, you might be better off looking at the Moz recommended companies like Peter mentioned.

Yes I believe its been happening from ages. These techniques are used by competitors mostly to sabotage the websites. However, how do you hack into such websites. Its very annoying. I am keeping an eye on the backlinks profile. Ahrefs didnt show any such link but I got this from the Google Search Console. These third party links pages are not even indexed in Google but still Google has got it in their Search Console report and Ahrefs is unable to detect these. Very strange!

I've made a disavow, and I keep an eye for bad link every month. We had a manual penalty and solve it in July. I see rankings downs for "phone cards" "calling cards", "international phone card", "international calling card" and other variations, and it happen from 10-13 January, when the new core algo was released.

Hi Andy, The "right" layout is going to be pretty specific to your business - a marine conservation nonprofit is going to have a much different homepage than an online sunglasses store (for example). In terms of the technical SEO elements, 99.9% of Wordpress sites will have them already: title/meta tags, H1/2/3s, proper use of markup, etc. - the 'optimization' part usually comes from updating/revising these, not adding them from scratch. I know the Yoast SEO plugin is a pretty popular WP plugin that gets recommended a lot, that will give you more granular control over some the the elements listed above. You'll definitely want to put some thought into your site structure/architecture as well as that will affect both crawling and your internal linking structure. A little more detail about the field you're in will help narrow in on some good examples. Good luck! Josh

Thanks for the response Anthony!  It's greatly appreciated. > splitting the link equity between these duplicate pages This is our main fear given that every listing page link uses this parameter. We thought about using the "No" option because we agree that the content doesn't really change, but google says this next to the option: "If many URLs differ only in this parameter, Googlebot will crawl one representative URL.".  It may have the same result?  Not sure. Maybe the following would force the issue? Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? >> Yes How does this parameter affect page content? >> Other Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? >> Every URL Also, we could try to delete their auto assignment of the parameter and hope for a different result.  Anyway, thanks again for the feedback.