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hi, i have the same question i have a product page with 4 tabs with different URLs. the content topic is relevant but different so what is the best practice in terms of  SEO, H1 and H2 should be different or it would be okay to have same H1 and H2 same on all pages . any other SEO suggestion for https://www.protoexpress.com/flex-pcb. Thanks, Sabeen

Hi Massimilano, Whoa, I've never heard of anyone creating a separate URL for every type of phone. There aren't that many differences between iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone browsers, so I'm surprised you're putting in the time to create one of each. If you don't mind me asking, what made you decide to build your site like this? In terms of SEO, though, here's what I'd do: make the iPhone version of your site the rel="alternate," since Googlebot calls itself an iPhone. When Google sends mobile visitors to the iPhone version of your site, just redirect them based on their device type. Hope this helps! Kristina

I saw the videos. I didn't know about them. Thanks for your info, Richard!

I would merge copy and 301 the weak one to the the strong one.

That's excellent Chris. Use the Remove Page function as well - it might help speed things up for you. -Andy

Thanks for the answer, Miriam. So in that case, the original question still stands..

This isn't an answer.  Its a rant.  So if you don't like rants, don't read it. Google is always telling webmasters to "do this" and "do that".   Sometimes they dictate to webmasters because they want to "kick them up a notch" but sometimes they dictate to webmasters because Google is incompetent at certain things and they want webmasters to make-up for their inadequacies.  Sometimes they tell webmasters to jump through this hoop or jump through that hoop and snatch the hoop away after you have left the ground.  Sometimes the hoop is invisible. Google told webmasters not long ago about an "authorship" program that would associate content with specific authors and show your photo in the SERPs.   I never wanted my name on my article and am too old to display my photo in the SERPs but I did this stuff regardless.  You had to connect your articles to your Google Plus page to make all of this work.  After millions of authors did this Google decided that our photos were stinkin' up the SERPs, then they changed their minds and abandoned the idea completely.  I think it was just a ploy to get million of great authors to join Google Plus. Several years ago Google also told authors that they should "write for Knol" and they would be rewarded with adsense.  I was going to put 1/2 of my time into writing "knols".  Good thing I didn't because Google abandoned that too. Matt Cutts told me in the comments of a Moz blog post that I could sculpt pagerank with nofollow.  Lots of people started doing that and Google changed their mind about that and changed how it influenced pagerank flow and never told anybody about it until months later. I could go on and on about Google dumping Reader, ignoring Feedburner and ton's of other stuff...  the bottom line is that if Google says you should do something, it doesn't mean that they actually use it or that it is going to help your rankings or even that it is safe. I also believe that some things that Google promotes are absolutely dangerous to the health of your websites in the SERPs.  I would bet one month's pay with confidence that Google Consumer Surveys is dangerous for the health of your SERPs, but that is just an opinion and a reason why I am not making buckets of money running it on my websites. And, in my opinion, Google Consumer Surveys is an excellent example that people on Silo A at Google don't even know that there are people working on something in Silo B that is totally contrary to their goals.    Mobile-friendly is a coding requirement and has nothing to do with your website being friendly to use on mobile.  It could really stink but they will tell everybody on the web that its friendly. Bottom line, you should be careful about jumpin' through any hoop that Google says to jump.  They have some great stuff at Google but they don't talk to each other and things tend to disappear.

Awesome! Great knowledge. Thanks you all!

Thanks for this response. Will migrating to a generic site let's say .com : affect the current rank of my current site perhaps turn off users outside the U.S. who might jump to conclusion that it is a U.S. based site Is it perhaps better to host the blog only on a separate generic .com site and having localised micro sites sans blog in other geographies?

The SERP did link to the correct (canonical target) domain. If the canonical tag is on domain1.com/product-a, the SERP was correctly pointed at domain2.com/product-a. Because the page on Domain 1 is supposed to be de-indexed, I was expecting not to see the page at all. This is my first crack at cross domain canonicals. It's an interesting way for Google to handle it. BTW, from a rankings perspective, the cross domain canonicals were extremely productive. Domain #2 got some huge rankings increases. I've been tracking the results closely. I should publish the results when I get a chance. The most important result is that the keywords (+/-700) associated with the canonicals  improved by an average of 22 positions over the higher position prior to the canonicals being implemented. What I mean by that is for a keyword (ex: "widgets"), Domain 1 was Ranked 46, and Domain 2 was ranked 57, our average improvement was to position 24, which is 22 positions better than the higher ranked domain (in this case, Domain 1). Rankings improvements for keywords already on page 1 or Page 2 increased by an average of 2.5 positions over the better ranked domain. What was really cool was that when we canonicaled in the "wrong" direction, where the keyword ranked higher on the domain that was getting the canonical tag, the results were indistinguishable from the results where we canonicaled in the "correct" direction. So, in this case, if a keyword ranked higher on domain1.com, and we canonicaled to domain2.com, the average ranking increases (from the higher ranking position) were almost identical to using canonicals in the "correct" direction (from the lower ranking position). These are both ecommerce sites with DAs of +/-40. What was also interesting is that Google accepted the canonicals in cases where our product descriptions were markedly different.

I noticed some big drops in the sites I monitor this update as well, yet rankings and traffic are business as usual. Patrick's link is helpful as are other's comments. The other thing I'd suggest is to monitor traffic, rankings and webmaster tools to make sure nothing is seriously wrong. If nothing arouses your suspicion, wait for the next update. This one was smaller than the last, root domains down by almost 10%. If you have a site with few incoming link sources, you're going to be more susceptible to sampling fluctuations.

My advice here is to get a good strong Scotch, a pack of headache tablets and settle in for the night - it sounds like one holy mess! The only thing I can really suggest is to just try and tackle one element at a time. The fact that so much has gone on with the sites, would suggest to me that Google has lost track of where it is all up to. Start at the beginning (wherever that is!) and work through sorting one issue at a time. -Andy

Excellent stuff. Glad it helped -Andy

Where this is  appearing the most is on cross domain canonicals. We have duplicate content across 2 websites, and we've canonicaled some pages from Site A to Site B, and some from Site B to Site A. In theory, pages that were canonicaled to the other domain should be deindexed. When I run a rankings report, I see pages for the wrong domain ranking, a month later. They are pages with parameters, or old URLs that we've changed. It's like a game of whack a mole. Every time we get a page deindexed, a duplicate with a different parameter takes its place. And this is in spite of calling out these parameters in GWT. What I imagine is happening is that we have several URLs for the same page indexed. When Google crawls our site, it is correctly canonicaling the page it crawls. In the rankings, however, Google is probably pulling a duplicate page out of its index, and ranking it without crawling it. If it was crawling it, Google would see the canonical tag, and not rank it. So we have an ongoing battle to get Google to crawl the page it just pulled out of its index to see the the canonical tag. The reason for all this is that when a page cross domain canonicals correctly, the rankings for the duplicate page on the other site goes up dramatically. As long as Google keeps ranking the wrong pages, we don't get the rankings bump on the other site.

Thanks for the response and whilst it is very useful, it doesn't actually answer my question. We know we want to change the brand, the question is more about how much change should you make in one go. The scenarios are: redesigned site - this is a consolidation of pages, structure change, and a move to a wordpress platform. A pretty major shake up then there's the rebrand and url change My question is, should we do 1 and 2 at the same time in one huge change, or is it more sensible to do 1 first and then after x months, implement change 2. Does that help clarify things?

Hi there You're at the mercy of Google for the moment. According to Google: "If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through." Have you looked into the Fetch as Google tool? You can submit your page(s) through that tool and submit them to the engine. Other than that, you're on Google's timeline, so I suggest hanging tight and waiting it out until the change sticks permanently. You've really done everything that you can, just be patient. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi, I am also very confused by the conflicting information out there. On one hand the general advice appears to be get your text to code ratio over 25%, but on the other hand Moz now includes as one of its "Spam Score"  factors and I quote "**Site Mark-up is Abnormally Small - **There's a high ratio of visible text compared to HTML, JavaScript, etc." So which is right for the best SERPS SEO???? Help, Glenn

Hi there Did you have any site changes on that day? GTM installed? Pages removed or updated? CTAs added or internal linking changes? Anything? Read the following: This is Why Your Bounce Rate Dropped in Analytics Explanation for a Dramatic Drop in Bounce Rate They discuss theories such as: Multiple pageviews triggers firing (being sent to Analytics) on a single page A duplicate installation of Google Analytics code Google Tag Manager installed along side of Google Analytics code Event is being sent to Analytics after pageview Hope this helps! Good luck!

We don't take phone calls from customers, but we give very fast and detailed email support.  This allows us to answer questions in writing and by kicking that writing up a notch by refining it on subsequent questions we then have an article to post on the site.   Add a few photos or drawings and its ready to go. No phone calls reduces the number of interruptions.  Then as your content library grows you get fewer and fewer questions and many of your email questions can be answered with a link to one or two articles. Our email messages to customers look like the answers to questions that Patrick Delehanty posts in Moz Q&A - and I think people appreciate that.

This is a lot of good advice, thanks.  I did only use those two keywords as an example though.  So I guess my next question would be this: what if terms that are "against your branding" would draw much more traffic to your site, compared to very similar terms that are in line with your branding?  I'm really wondering if it would create consistency issues with the brand's messaging.  To people really care (or subconsciously notice) messaging differences in the page title/meta description vs. the content that's on the page or seen in marketing material? Thanks