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Not to muddy the waters, but I have had a client with sites (2) going after the same keyword set -- my first thought was to condense them into one through a 301 strategy towards the "stronger" domain. For a myriad of non-SEO reasons, this didn't happen in a short timeframe and we ended up really glad it didn't. Our SEO efforts for domain A were helping domain B through some inter-linking we were doing and today (1.5~ years later) the sites are ranking #2 and #3 for hundreds of the same keywords. We actually spent some time removing some of those links between domains as many were using exact-match anchor text and did not any major losses in traffic to either domain. In general I'd say that having one single site is better from a content management, link building and branding perspective. However, I do not feel that is blanket advice anymore. Perhaps the best strategy here is to redirect the "worst" performing domain into site A and carefully keep an eye on your rankings/traffic, then slowly phase in the other sites over time. I'd also be cautious about 301'ing many sites into a valuable site all at once as you may lose out on traffic. If the keywords overlap and you have more than one site ranking, I'd think about perhaps consider leaving the "second best" site up for a few months to see how it performs. You may be happy with the results.

I love this question, Adriaan. It's one that a lot of people have asked over the years and that a lot of people have had to deal with over time especially with ecommerce sites like those you work on. As you well know, there are multiple ways to handle duplicate content: The way you are proposing, which is moving to a static URL structure that always keeps the same order A web of canonicals like you seem to have set up (and it sounds like you have it set up correctly) The whack-a-mole approach of periodically looking for duplicate content and implementing redirects, which can lead to further issues with internal redirects. This is not a good scalable option. SEO is all about processes. If you have a canonical process that is working for you and has been scalable (eg you are not manually specifying the URL for each new category created, which is probably done when the merchandising team or feeds update the site), that works to a certain extent. However, this is like treating a bunch of cuts on your hands with bandaids but not dealing with the fact that a) you only have so much space on your hands and can only apply so many bandaids, and b) that you're still getting cuts on your hands. I prefer to deal with the root of the issue, which in your case is that you can have multiple URLs targeting the same terms based on the user's (or Googlebot's!) crawl path on your site. I am assuming that you are only putting the canonicals in your XML and HTML sitemaps, by the way? If I were you, this is how I would tackle your problem: Make sure you are only putting in the canonical URLs to your XML sitemaps. Start here. Do a full crawl of your site and pull all the URLs that are canonicaling elsewhere. Then get your log files and see how much time the search engines are spending on these canonical'd URLs. Also check to see that Google is indeed respecting all of your canonicals! At this scale of canonicals, I'd expect that they are semi-often not respecting them and you are still dealing with duplicate content issues. But again, that's just a hunch I have. Make a decision from there, off of discussions with your engineers/designers/etc about how much work is involved, about if you think it's worthwhile to make the change. I am **always **a fan of eliminating pages that are canonical'd and not serving a purpose (example: a PPC landing page might be canonical'd and noindexed, and you don't want to remove that page). My suspicion in your case, as well, is that having /brand/mens won't convert any differently from /mens/brand. At the end of the day, you need to decide how you want your site organized and if your customers (the people buying things on the site) prefer to shop by brand or by gender/sport/whatever. This will help you decide what way to architect your URLs and your site's flow. Hope that helps! John

Many thanks Gianluca, think I was looking at it too technically yesterday.. got blind to it! Think I've sorted it now! Really appreciate the help, Lee.

Hi Tim, thanks for your help. Yes wordpress will be installed in a folder /blog/ So it should be quite simple to do this redirect! Regards Tai

Hi Kay, Using third party sites such as Feefo to collect reviews is still good practice. You can collect reviews on both your overall service and individual products with them. Their full integration looks like the best method. As well as that, JSON is a little easier on your website so won't affect your page speed. It's usually a little easier to integrate as well. When you use Feefo as well you can mark your site up with schema markup and include your reviews to become eligible for organic stars. Hope this helps!

Actually my question wasnt't about the img itself, was the fact that i don't use only the image as anchor. We use the  whole block. Anyway, thanks for answering.

Google testing tool seems to be showing a Software Application schema but not the reviews. When I pull out just the review source code, it's saying that the item being reviewed is missing. Honestly, though, trouble-shooting these can be tricky sometimes. I'd check the tool, though, and just take a look at the errors: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/ It is possible to have the schema correct and still not get reviews, though, if Google simply decides not to display reviews for that SERP. I'm not seeing anyone with reviews for the first give pages of that query, so that's a solid sign that this may be more than just mark-up. Google seems to ramp up and scale back which queries get reviews all the time, and there's no way to track that (other than their presence/absence). Most you can do is double-check the code and hope for the best. Sorry, I know that's not a very satisfying answer.

Hi Rebecca, I would say it doesn't matter. The optimised posts will most likely get higher rankings. I very regularly edit and extend posts with up to date info and this is only resulting in better rankings because of the "fresh" content I provide. Best wishes to you too! Regards, Tymen

Hey MV - What you say here I don't think is the correct way to be thinking about it: "My thought would have been that the sub domain is only as good as the main domain and in this case the main domain isn't strong because little or no content is hosted on it." As I said in my original comment, there isn't really a "main domain" with a technical implementation. Your subdomain should be able to rank just fine as long as it is the canonical, has links to it, and the migration was done correctly from the old to the new. I still suspect that there are a lot of links left to the old site setup that are not yet benefitting where your site is now. A subdomain is a separate site from another subdomain, so site.domain.com is different from www.domain.com and has its own ranking potential. Links to www.domain.com may have a knockon effect for ranking site.domain.com, but you also need links to site.domain.com to really be able to rank.

Great, thanks very much!

A "head term" is essentially the opposite of a long-tail keyword.  For instance if you find a long-tail keyword that gets 100-500 searches per month and isn't too difficult to rank for ... say that keyword is "homes for sale in vancouver bc" ... the head term in this case is "homes for sale" which would be getting a lot more search volume but would also be extremely more difficult to rank for because everyone is trying to rank for it.  In this case, if you're a national brand, both keywords are useful to you so you can create a page optimized for "homes for sale" (the head term) and optimize it for both this term and the long-tail. Flimsy example, I'm sorry, but my mind is blanking and this is the best I can give you! haha.  Also just noticed this post is over a month old but I'm gonna post this anyway in case it helps anyone.  Cheers.

The issue of the internal links of your site going through 301-redirects isn't being caused by the htaccess file, John - in fact that file is partially saving you from the bigger issue. The problem is that your WordPress migration to HTTPS was incomplete. After the migration, you missed the step of going through the WP database and changing all the static URLs to the HTTPS versions as well. This can be done using a mySQL query through phpMyAdmin, but the easiest way is to use the Better Search Replace plugin. (You need to be sure you're correctly handling serialised data, which the plugin does automatically.) In addition, you're going to want to insure that you've updated the WordPress Address URL and the Site URL in Settings > General to the HTTPS versions of the URLs. The final check will then be to make certain all the static assets loaded by the site (and any referenced from 3rd parties) are also being loaded over HTTPS as well. Watch especially for 3rd party form codes like newsletter subscription forms, social media widgets, and other widgets in sidebars as these aren't caught by the rewrite plugin I mentioned earlier. This step is essential to insure you don't have "mixed content" on the pages which cause you to get a non-secure warning from the browser. You may have used a "Switch to HTTPS" plugin for this process initially, but the majority of those don't accomplish their task in the most SEO-effective way. Using the method outlines above will both make the search engines happier,and will make for faster webpage performance as well. Let me know if you have further questions. Paul

Hi, How long ago did you publish the page? What you refer is "on page" elements: h1, title and URL are one part of the job. Sure, if you got the exact keyword match, you got more chances to get to the top SERP. However, you're missing the second part of the job: links. You're page is new so you may not have any link. Here's a process you can use: Link the pages already well indexed you're referring to the new page. Use the MozBar to analyse the 2 first results, and check for the links of those pages. Do they have more than you? Scan those pages using https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/, and try to get their links. Scan also the top10 results on this keywords and go get some links Best.

Seems strange that the duplicate url is being created - without knowing if you've used the Twitter embed option or a plugin, it's a bit difficult to figure out the issue. You're probably better off solving it by fixing the duplication issue, rather than hiding it with a redirect, as you'll end up with a large number of redirects in place if it continues... If you did just want to redirect everything, then the easiest would be to add a redirect via .htaccess for anything /www.twitter.com to redirect to the proper blog post title. Honestly, I'd question having the Twitter feed on your blog? If it's just your own posts appearing, then it's not going to offer any value over having a follow button - it's only if it's aggregating multiple sources that it's worthwhile...

Hi Rob, I would recommend using htaccess 301 redirects. If you're not currently using htaccess you just need to create a file in your website's root folder and name it .htaccess and jsut add a 301 redirect line for each redirect that you want to do. See below for example. Redirect 301 /bootcampuk.php /bootcamps.jsp So it's Redirect 301 Old-Url New-Url Let me know if you have any questions!

Hi Ricky, If you look at Restaurant item on Schema.org you'll see that they have a property for menu. Restaurant Property Info --> https://schema.org/Restaurant They suggest either wrapping the entire menu with the itemprop="menu" tag or linking to it. Below is an example of a linked menu. Fondue for Fun and Fantasy Fantastic and fun for all your cheesy occasions. Open: Daily from 11:30am till 11pm Phone: 555-0100-3333 View our menu.

Thanks for the answers! I actually found out it had to do with a subheadline that was in all caps in the articles that was coming through. SEO, the neverending puzzle...

Thank you Martijn!