Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, I wouldn't recommend doing this, it's going to be a lot of work and you probably won't see any benefit. The historical value of those URLs is much stronger than any boost you'd get by taking out a few date folders. It's very common for blogs to have this URL structure, search engines are well aware of this structure and aren't going to ding you for having long or deep folder URLs. Additionally, since your blog is 10 years old, you've probably got tons of posts, which means tons of 301 redirects. You have to take Google with a grain of salt when they come out and say things like "301s pass all authority now", it doesn't mean you should go out and redirect every page on your site. At some point you're going to begin affecting page speed, particularly on mobile devices.

To echo MichaelAMG - it is possible to install wordpress on a subdirectory rather than subdomain so you'd be able to host your blog at mysite.com/blog  instead of blog.mysite.com. For SEO reasons, subdirectory is the recommended way to go. On https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain, Moz explain that search engines view subdomains differently than they do subfolders, which means that it can be harder for successful content in a subdomain to benefit the site as a whole. Companies who host their blogs on subdomains have started moving them to subdirectories and have quite quickly seen positive results, for instance Salesforce moved their blog from a subdomain to a subdirectory and their traffic doubled pretty immediately. If you are installing wordpress instances on one domain it might be a good idea to keep an eye on your permalinks because if you have url rewriting turned on then the different installs can sometimes confuse each other. Just something to watch out for.

No—Google won't penalize you for using the same image across different landing pages. However, I would recommend using a unique image if you have an ecommerce site and are selling different products (or variations of the same product). From a user experience, if the image looks good, is compressed for quick loading, and makes sense on your pages you should be good.

Yes, unfortunately, what the agency is suggesting is like a recipe from a duplicate content cookbook. They are trying to offer a shortcut to doing the actual work that should be involved in publishing hundreds of websites. Has the business ever considered consolidating everything into a single brand with a single site? That way, they could have 1 page for each city and 1 page for each service, redirecting all the old sites to the new one, and never having to worry again about creating content for hundreds of microsites.

Hey Ricky, Just to answer the straightforward questions - yes - profile links vs expert source reference are weighted differently. Though there are tons of other factors in play like the anchor text (does it show as repetitive generic spam or organic linking), the reputation of publication, and whether they made it a rel=nofollow link could hurt the reputation of the publication causing it to be less than a profile link. Profile links can help with the exact brand name but not as much for the general search terms you're going for. Local business SEO is tougher to be sure - make sure to check out the Moz local tool: moz.com/local   and be sure to register with Google Business to manage how you show up. Big picture! Do all of these small actions matter, especially when you can't see the ROI on day 1 =  yes.  SEO is the ongoing act of optimization - not a one and done action. Keep in mind that you are also crushing it for awareness and reputation when you land those press hits and thought leadership placements, regardless of the SEO value. Doing the little things the right way will add up over time. Here is a solid backup of link building as a strategy: https://moz.com/blog/state-of-links Hope that helps!

Do you have traffic data for any of these pages? If they're landing pages and garner clicks then obviously you'll want to keep them indexed. The revenue you're receiving from these pages could be due to users navigating to them from brand pages, product categories, menus, or it could be cross-selling, etc. I would say consolidate as many as you can for UX purposes so a customer doesn't have to click off of the page for another color or size.

Hi Michael The problem you have is the very low value content that exists on all of those pages and the complete impossibility of writing any unique Titles, Descriptions and content. There are just too many of them. With a footwear client of mine I no indexed a huge slug of tags taking the page count down by about 25% - we saw an immediate 22% increase in organic traffic in the first month. (March 18th 2017 - April 17th 2017) the duplicates were all size and colour related. Since canonicalising (I'm English lol) more content and taking the site from 25,000 pages to around 15,000 the site is now 76% ahead of last year for organics.  This is real measurable change. Now the arguments: Canonicalisation How are you going to canonicalise 10,000+ pages ? unless you have some kind of magic bullet you are not going to be able to but lets look at the logic. Say we have a page of Widgets (brand) and they come in 7 sizes. When the range is fully in stock all of the brand/size pages will be identical to the brand page, apart from the title & description. So it would make sense to canonicalise back to the brand. Even when sizes started to run out, all of the sizes will be on the brand page. So size is a subset of the brand page. Similar but not the same for colour. If colour is a tag then every colour sorted page will be on the brand page. So really they are the same page - just a slimmer selection. Now I accept that the brand page will contain all colours as it did all sizes but the similarity is so great - 95 % of the content being the same apart from the colour, that it makes sense to call them the same. So for me Canonicalisation would be the way to go but it's just not possible as there are too many of them. Noindex The upside of noindex is that it is generally easier to put the noindex tag on the page as there is no URL to tag. The downside is that the page is then not indexed in Google so you lose a little  juice - I would argue by the way that the chances of being found in Google for a size page is extremely slim, less than 2% of visits came from size pages before we junked them and most of those were from a newsletter so reality is <1% not worth bothering about You could leave off the nofollow so that Google crawls through all of the links on the pages - the better option. Considering your problem and having experience of a number of sites with the same problem Noindex is your solution. I hope that helps Kind Regards Nigel - Carousel Projects.

Yes they should have put some groundwork in place before doing it! Especially of they knew it was such an important page. Regards Nigel

Hi Alex This is exactly the way I guide all my eCommerce clients when they are setting up their product pages. The colour becomes an attribute and sits after the main URL using a # - the URL is therefore non colour specific. the advantage is that you will not have all the colours of a style competing in Google for rank where all the content on the page apart from the colour is duplicate content. I have seen a huge advantage in setting styles up this way. Colour can be a drop down on the page but make sure you tell the developer to list all colours on the category and brand pages otherwise the number of style options can look a bit thin. This site does it well (I set it up) - like you are suggesting - Google stops at the # - no need to mess with parameters. https://www.shoon.com/mens-c108 Good luck Nigel - Carousel Projects

href lang tags are your friend Stick everything on the same website for the DA with pagination website/uk website/USA website/NZ then just put the appropriate lang tags in place so google understands each page should be seen in each country Be VERY careful implementing this and if you're not sure pay someone to do. Do it right and it's excellent seo, do it badly it's going to go VERY wrong

Ahhh ok I follow you Yes, in that case, that is be a much better approach! Thanks for clearing that up. Cheers!

Hi This is really helpful thank you, I think at the moment I'd rather keep them from being crawled as the pages aren't helpful for crawlers. I will look into it in future if required. Thanks very much!

I'm not sure if this is a time issue, it is sure weird! I do see some of the pages as your competitors. But not all. And a search for your brand name from the US produces the English page. So everything looks okay there. How is indexation at this point? My apologies for responding so late. Was your site down for maintenance at all in the last month or so?

Hi Carolyn, Google won't automatically ignore what's after the ? and these URLs can be indexed if they are not dealt with correctly. Usually, query string URLs will be canonicalized to the URL without the query string, which is the correct way to handle it if you don't want them to be indexed. You'll also have to make sure that the canonical URL is not redirecting. Your issue sounds like a common Woo Commerce issue where it adds this type of query string to every page on the site, canonicalizes back to the non-query string, but the canonical URL redirects to the query string URL - and in the end Google ignores your canonical tags because they redirect and they index your query string URLs (I hope that makes sense). There is a setting in Woo Commerce where you can turn off 'Default Customer Location' if you don't want the query string URLs used, but you should check with someone who knows more about the site to make sure that doing so won't cause any unwanted issues. Cheers, David

Thank you guys both to the feedback and links!! This helps a bunch!

Hello Moz Team, Can anyone tell me it is possible to implemented AMP for single page? Thanks!

According to Google search console between 18th of May and 21st of May. We had a temporary big position drop, with apparently no change in traffic volume but CTR seems to have dropped a bit and not recovered.  Ever since then the graph is quite choppy compared to before but avg position & CTR seem to remain fairly constant. Crosschecking to traffic in GA this month's traffic compared to last has dropped by about 5% but that could be related to seasonal changes. With regards to positions I normally monitor weekly to cut out some of the noise that happens with Google these days.  What do you use the daily tracking?

Looks like a bonus that comes with a featured snippet: http://i.imgur.com/bWWrXKe.jpg

I've had similar questions regarding duplicate content. Thanks for the helpful answer and link!