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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.


  • Hi D, As per Martijn's response, this example is a JS asset required by your WordPress theme. It's unusual that this would end up indexed by Google (even more unusual that any users would inadvertently stumble upon it - is there any indication of that?). It sounds like there's a lot of this going on, but one thing I'd suggest initially is first verifying whether these URLs are actually getting impressions/clicks in search results via Search Console's "Search Analytics" report. I suspect Martijn is right in that this isn't an issue worth much time/attention (a huge portion of the web runs on WordPress, Google has no trouble sorting out actual pages vs JS resources and similar URLs that shouldn't be served to users), but if there are really "a ton" of these URLs showing up, it might be worth verifying search users aren't actually seeing/clicking on these URLs so you can rest assured it's not a high-priority concern. Best, Mike

    | MikeTek
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  • Thanks James. I only wish the client would use a different ecommerce platform, but they are committed to Webjaguar for now.

    | JBMediaGroup
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  • Thank you all for responding, I will follow your advice. Leebi

    | Leebi
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  • Hi James, sorry I know we have another similar thread going about this! Not harsh at all - it's something I don't know enough about so need to brush up on. I will do some research on caching mechanisms. Why won't any of my other SEO matter? Becky

    | BeckyKey
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  • Hi Jacob, Experts have been writing about the declining importance of exact match domains for many years (those two articles are both from 2012). In general, if you already had a setup like the one you are proposing, there's a good chance we would be recommending consolidating the domains. You might also be interested in this whiteboard Friday. Good luck - hope something there helps.

    | willcritchlow
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  • Anyone have any more thoughts on this please?

    | Nigel_Carr
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  • It depends. If it was deindexed for many days its possible that rankings will not be exactly the same.  If the time off is not that much it will probably return with no harm. All this taking in consideration that the redirects, https and all that stuff is correctly done.

    | GastonRiera
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  • Sorry to tell you, .ag is not a recognized generic TLD. If you put your site on a ccTLD (country specific TLD), you cannot change the targeting to something outside of that country. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en That link as a list of ccTLDs that they see as generic like .io, but .ag is not one of them. You will need to use a different TLD, a generic one, for your plan to work.

    | katemorris
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  • It's not best practice for sure, and it doesn't help with SEO (ideally, you want clean, clear, descriptive URLs and paths). That said, if Google can index the content of the page (or the image), it's not a dealbreaker. You can check by using the URL/image path in Google Images e.g. this one.

    | randfish
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  • Hi there, There are many ways to do it. In my opinion: If the amount of pages is low, you can do it in just one sitemap. If the amount is really huge, do it in different sitemaps, stating in the name of each of them the language (e.g. sitemap-es-mx.xml) and create a sitemap_index.hml with all those. Remember that its best practice to have the sitemaps in the root folder: domain.com/sitemap Best luck. GR.

    | GastonRiera
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  • By non-entry page, I mean it's a page that may be indexed, now or in the future, but it essentially will always be buried in the rankings (unless you searched for the exact page title and first sentence words lol).  In other words, it's not a page I'm trying to get ranked high so realistically its never going to be a page users enter my site through. The consensus seems to confirm my initial gut on this.  With limited time to spend on SEO, you have to prioritize.  Meta description on a "non-entry" page should be very low priority since it's not a ranking factor and the meta description will be rarely seen if ever when the page is going to be on like page 7 of the SERPs for virtually all relevant searches. The only case I can think of for doing this is if you are using Google for your own site search and you do want the page to be properly described in an internal site search result.

    | MrSem
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  • Hello, Thanks for your reaction. The url's of both snippets are the same (https://www). Since these are the same url's there is no canonical url. We have recently changed the meta description, so a recrawl does look like the best option.

    | conversal
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  • You should be fine either way as long as there is anchor text and a link being rendered on the page.

    | Packaging-Group
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  • This is a great question, in doing A/B testing with some of our clients we have generally seen improved rankings for a specific city if we include that city in the meta title of the website page. Since you are targeting 3 cities, I would consider writing unique "city landing pages", for each city and then only mention that one city in the meta title. If you do this, try to make each city landing page as unique and helpful as possible, with unique city data, customer review/testimonials from that city, etc.

    | LureCreative
    1

  • Buzz bundle, and link assistant from seo power suite has tools for this type of usage. You can also save "persona" profile information to create accounts on websites automatically. You will likely run into issues with captchas, but you can add a death by captcha account that allows the program to solve them automatically. For a more manual configuration, you can automate several components of what you want to accomplish using scrapy or beautiful soup tools for python to gather form fields and properties from a the list of urls with regex conditions.

    | Packaging-Group
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  • Thanks James It is frustrating that Google rewards such practices, and as the sites in question operate around lower volume search terms I dont see this changing any time soon. The argument has been, 'look at how well we are doing with these other sites - how can it be wrong'..... its difficult to educate managment on the risks when the current data proves the wrong way works. I wonder if anybody on here has been in a similar spot and managed to result in some form of win? Thanks again.

    | goodersuk
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  • You helped validate my thoughts. Yeah, the reason I am taking this so seriously is because we are taking so much time to map out the old domain and the pages to their corresponding new pages, that I don't want something like this to ruin it. The client ended up saying that they don't mind reprinting a handful of business cards to reflect the old domain and then use the new cards when the new site is up. Either way, I think both options are doable. Thanks mememax! Appreciate it.

    | Khoo
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  • I think I've come to the same conclusion.  On many blog sites you may have multiple recent posts on the home page and then individual post pages for those same posts.  Similar to FAQs.  Google is smart enough to see, oh this is just another type of organization of this content that exists on individual pages. It appears even though pages higher in the hierarchy are supposed to carry more weight, that Google favors indexing the individual pages deeper down than the "category" pages higher up.

    | MrSem
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