Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.
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Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
Hi Kingalan I did offer to help after you emailed me. I emailed back but didn't hear anything back from you. Regards Nigel
| Nigel_Carr0 -
What to do about new meta description character limit?
Pete at Moz updated his "How Long Should Your Meta Descriptions Be?" post last night: He says this: "At the end of the day, I think it comes down to control. For critical pages, writing a good meta description is like writing ad copy — there's real value in crafting that copy to drive interest and clicks. There's no guarantee Google will use that copy, and that fact can be frustrating, but the odds are still in your favor..." Like he says, I think it ultimately comes down to what makes the most sense for that page. For some pages on our website, a very short description seems to suffice. These can be as short as 50 characters. For some of our more "weightier" pages, like our services pages, we try our best to entice the user to click with a true description of what they will find on the page, as well as the action they might be expected to take. These may be around 300 characters. We're pretty confident (Dr. Pete is too) that this is a safe number that won't get cut off, regardless any features or "Jump To" links Google may add to the result. Cheers!
| brooksmanley2 -
Urgent: Any point having /au version of the website for Australia?
Duplicate Content I have experience facing problems like these ones. In the past, I worked with sites multilingual and multi-region and even multi-location (same country but different cities) websites, mostly for Hotels, Restaurants, and Business related to the tourism. First of all (probably you did it. But is ok keeping it in mind) Add Every domain and every variation of your domains on Search Console http:yoursite.com http:www.yoursite.com https:yoursite.com https:www.yoursite.com Talking about your questions It's common for websites to provide similar or the same content in different languages when targeting different regions while having different URLs. Google is okay with this as long as the users are from different countries. Your website will not be penalized when translation is manual and accurate. Even though Google still prefers unique content for each version, it understands that having unique content can be quite tough. Google clearly states that you don't need to hide such content by not allowing Google to crawl it using a robots.txt file or no index robots meta tag. The circumstances are entirely different if you're providing the same content to the same audience through two URLs. Let me explain this with an example. Imagine you've created yourbusiness.com and yourbusiness.com.au. One targets the USA and other targets Australia respectively. Since both are in English, this will cause duplicate content. Luckily, it can be easily solved using an hreflang tag, which is widely accepted by all search engines globally. The hreflang tag protects international SEO campaigns from being penalized with duplicate content. It's usually required by businesses that cater to different languages or countries through sub-domains, subfolders, or ccTLD. The hreflang tag also is important if you have multiple languages for one single targeted country. Here's what I do to implementing it: Step 1: First, we must handle language targeting. You'll have to list out the URLs that have equivalents in different languages. Any stand-alone or non-equivalent URLs would not need the hreflang tag, so don't list them. Step 2: Now comes setting up the tag. This is what a general hreflang tag looks like: All you need are the country-wide codes http://www.mathguide.de/info/tools/languagecode.html For having a site that targets different countries in same language, you'll use code like: **Step 3:**Here the hreflang="x-default" is used to create a default common page for all countries. This is generally the homepage or another neutral page for all countries. After implementation, you can check that what you've done works properly by logging into your Google Webmaster Tool account. Proceed to "Search Traffic" and then "International Targeting." If the hreflang tags were placed properly, you'll be able to test them utilizing the feature presented there. When problems ensue, try using the hreflang tag generator tool to make things easy. Common Mistakes to Avoid Incorrect use of language codes: All tags should contain codes as per ISO 639-1. Using incorrect ones will negatively impact your international SEO. Missing confirmation link: If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A with a proper hreflang tag. IF THIS ANSWER WERE USEFUL MARK IT AS A GOOD ANSWER
| Roman-Delcarmen1 -
Did We Implement Structured Data Correctly?
I've spent the entire morning researching and editing our Schema code on an FAQ page. Does this look right regarding the breadcrumb Schema? There's two... the first one our developer put in the functions.php file so it goes across all our FAQ pages and the second one I added manually so that it breaks down each question & answer. https://www.medicarefaq.com/faqs/when-can-i-buy-a-medicare-supplement-plan/ https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.medicarefaq.com%2Ffaqs%2Fwhen-can-i-buy-a-medicare-supplement-plan%2F
| LindsayE0 -
Has Anyone Encountered This Old Meta Tag and Know It's Past Function?
Hi there If I remember right, this was a form of letting search engines know what URL should be ranking and getting credit for content, kind of like a canonical tag. I might be wrong here and would love to know if I am! Hope this helps! Patrick
| PatrickDelehanty0 -
How to determine the value of these links?
Hello, I think the best answer is Patrick's one, but I'd like to add this: "Homepages usually get all the strength (=link juice, highest Page Authority or URL Rating for a specific domain). Tipically, this link juice will pass internally from the homepage to the rest of pages, but this authority will be reduced when going deeper into other subfolders". Best regards,
| AgenciaSEO.eu0 -
Negative SEO impact of two Similar Domains on Same IP
Hi Amber The server or IP address has little to no effect on SEO. Your biggest concern is having a server that is close to your audience in terms of geographic location, that it is fast, and that you are not encumbered by the traffic to any other sites sharing the same IP. For this reason, always go for a dedicated server which will have it's own unique IP and SSL certificate. Locate the second site on a separate server. The fact that they share the same neighbourhood or range of IP's is irrelevant. We have covered this before so this thread might be of interest to you: https://moz.com/community/q/ip-address-of-server-an-seo-factor I hope that helps, Kind Regards Nigel
| Nigel_Carr0 -
Launching Brand New Subdomain To Outrank & Outperform Main Domain
I would improve the main domain. Building a subdomain will divide your power. We redirected all of our subdomains into folders a few years ago and the results have been kickass.
| EGOL0 -
How to treat a website with several different types of subject matter
Again, I tend to agree. But when mapping it out on a whiteboard, and showing how the subdomains would link to one another, for cross selling purposes, it seems so elegant and clean. his is one of those instances where my heart says yes but my reason, according to the evidence, says no.
| minyona0 -
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
We would never know that. That "Ranking strengh" is the sum of all the ranking factors google uses (I may guess over 500) that only Google knows and never will reveal. Moz tries to analyze and is a nice metric, I will nor rely completely on it, because it only uses on page data, that is just a part of what google analyzes. Hope I've clarified, if don't just ask again
| GastonRiera0 -
Duplicate content across domains?
Hi Roxanne There's two general ways you go can: 1. Will the pages be exactly the same or very similar (like 95% or more)? If so, and you want to be 100% sure Google ranks the right one and consolidates their signals, you can use a Canonical tag. Point it from the page you don't want to rank to the page you do want to rank. 2. If the pages are different - different content, menus, functionality (can you purchase on one but not the other?) etc... then don't use a canonical - but do everything you can to a) make them different, b) make it clear to users the products exist in both places, c) cross-link them if you can, d) try consistently promote one over the other. I also _highly _recommend you check out this great new post on duplicate content by Alexis - it's one of the best I've seen!
| evolvingSEO0 -
What is this on SERP results?
Hi, That is Google answer box and if you know how Google pulls it please watch below whiteboard friday from Rand Fishkin. https://moz.com/blog/how-to-appear-in-googles-answer-boxes-whiteboard-friday Hope this helps. Thanks
| Alick3000 -
Search console site verification
Your dev is right on the specific question of whether the additional GMB profiles are necessary for Google to understand which is the primary version. This is not essential as long as the proper redirects are in place. It's a "belt and suspenders" approach. If there's no way for the search engine crawlers to ever reach anythig but the primary version, then there's no way for them to get it wrong. You're using the GMB info to reinforce what the redirects are already doing. (That said - it's trivial to reinforce the redirect process with the declaration in GMB, so best practice is to do that as well. You need the GMB profile to properly manage the other aspects of marketing the site anyway, so...) Put another way - declaring the primary version of the site using the alternate GMB profiles is Google's way of allowing those who might not have proper dev access to sites to at least partly accomplish the same thing from within GMB which they can manage. The real value to verifying the other versions in GMB is so that you can monitor to make certain that those non-canonical versions of the site are in fact definitely not getting indexed or ranked. This is essential after an HTTPS migration, for example, as you should see the HTTP profile showing a steady drop in indexing while the HTTPS profile shows the steady increase. A periodic check of the non-canonical GMB profiles will alert you immediately to any newly discovered issues Google's crawlers may be encountering (like a sitewide redirect got accidentally removed or changed, for example.) Make sense? Paul
| ThompsonPaul0 -
How to stop internal Dynamically created links that generate 404s
A nofollow is a good idea moving forward. That will stop it from happening again. If you do the robots.txt, they can still index, just with no information on the page. If I were you, I'd add the nofollow.
| katemorris0 -
Internal links decrease dramatically
None of them. but the website is generated by angular js.
| canadaoptimize0 -
How do I add https version of site to Bing webmaster tools?
All you need to do is update the XML sitemap URL: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/http-to-https/#gsc
| rich.owings1 -
Want to get site on same sub-folder but move CMS
How big is your store? By far the easiest way to manage this is to use Shopify's WordPress plugin for inserting a Shopify store into a WordPress site. Here's a decent rundown of the pros/cons and process. Once in pace, you could use 301-redirects for any URL changes to shop URLs to transfer authority of old shop pages to new ones. Would that method work for you? Paul
| ThompsonPaul0