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Hey Aaron! Thanks for providing us with this answer, we looked into this direction and found the bug that caused the glitch in how the traffic was being redirected the wrong way. Much appreciated!

Hi there, You should add in the hreflang annotation the final URL showing the content, not one that is just 301 redirecting to another. Are you seeing errors in the Google Search Console "International Targeting" report? If you see "no return tags" errors there for Japan, then means Google is not being able to identify them. Thanks!

I would suggest having a bit of a read over this old blog post which gives  you the necessary info to implement the rel=canonical tag correctly. https://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions I do not think that having the rel=canonical tag pointing to itself would necessarily harm your site, but it is probably best to avoid this if possible as is redundant code. If you have a dynamic meta / header include this might be the best solution for you if you cannot control it manually or by editing the code. I often have the rel canonical running in numerous pages, especially to help reduce MVT pages from being indexed.

Yes, sorry I used the form on their support site for the webmaster tools : https://www.bing.com/webmaster/support Although that doesn't seem to be working at this moment so the email address that it was sent to is : ucmbwts@microsoft.com Hope this helps!

Thanks for everyone's comments, this is helpful! Does anyone have any advice on how to better boost category pages? We are looking at user guides, and more content - but this won't all be directly on the category page. Ill have a bit of content on then category page, but this alone isn't going to have a huge impact. Becky

Escaped fragments are not recommended by Google anymore. Google now recommends Progressive Enhancement such as the History API pushState. See this article for details: https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html Here's another post that you may want to check out: https://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/ -Dan

Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of opinions on what happened and not a lot of solid evidence (including my own, which is inconclusive, sadly). Google tightened up on something content-related, it seems, but we're not sure what. It's hard to speak in generalarities, but if I had to start somewhere, I'd be looking for Panda-like signals. Do you have content that could be considered thin, and/or are you facing duplication either within your site or across competitors sites? Is your site generally too big, in terms of indexed pages, for your authority (i.e. the strength of your link profile)? It may simply be that Google turned up the volume on a few factors. If this is content-related, the good news is that fixes should generally impact your rankings fairly quickly. This doesn't seem to be a Penguin-like situation.

Great thank you for the feedback. This is being run by another team, but we want the chance to provide some feedback. Does anyone have any great examples of product page designs?

Hi Dani! Did Matt or John answer your question? If so, please mark one or more responses as a "Good Answer." It'll give them some bonus MozPoints, and it helps us keep track of things.

Hi Steven, To my understanding, Bing and Yahoo are essentially the same thing these days; they're the same engine, so that's good news I'm always dubious of "complete list of ranking factors" type blog posts, but check out this post from Matthew Woodward. Beyond the intro, most of the top section is quite irrelevant to you here but scroll down and you'll find a bunch of great resources that might highlight something you can do to see you ranking better. Fixing up that outdated sitemap is going to be a good idea either way. Hope that helps!

Hi Becky, If only it was that simple Open Graph, although is picked up by other platforms, is mainly for providing structured data to social platforms (mainly facebook). Plus, when you view source the open Graph tags do not reference the paragraph that Google uses for the "answer" it uses the intro paragraph which doesn't answer the question. The title is the question, so that is a step in the right direction. The answer is the second paragraph which is not referenced in any structured data that I could see. Like many things in the search landscape we do not have direct control on how Google interprets the data and display results. What we can do is place our site in the most optimized position to be interpreted properly and provide results, things like descriptive titles and meta descriptions, Schema, etc. will help position your site for interpretation. But in the end the Google Bot analysis of all of the info on your site is what determines what results are displayed. for me more details check out: http://searchengineland.com/optimizing-google-quick-answers-box-215037 it's a year old, but most of the facts stand true.

Hi Jonathan, Firstly, reporting on keyword data from web analytics is a very outdated practice. The reason for this is that Google took away nearly all keyword data. So those reports are junk data. If you did want to get this data anyway, you could use IF or COUNTIF functions to return those values.

haha! That's uncanny timing!!! Yes Chris. You heard it here first Thanks for the update.

Hi Jacob I tried to check your product pages but they're loading extremely slowly. I have very fast connection, so that's definitely a bad sign. Test your product pages with tools.pingdom.com and www.webpagetest.org to find possible page speed issues. If page load take more than 20-30 seconds and Googlebot experienced the same issue, it might just ignore your product pages and show the category pages instead.

Definitely check out our Ranking Factors survey.  As far as Accessibility, many good practices such as providing transcripts for videos and alt text for images are just good SEO too.

No problem. Screaming Frog (or any crawler) won't pick it up, because it's not being linked to within the website (it's an "orphaned" page). Google could still index them because they are in the sitemap, but it took so long because they are no actually linked to from the website. So... if it's not supposed to be indexed at all in the first place, you can add a meta "noindex" tag to the page and remove it from the sitemap. Then you'll be all set

According to the official website, AMP is for content producers and not for e-commerce sites. Two relevant questions I found in the FAQ: Who will be able to use Accelerated Mobile Pages? The project is open to all players in the ecosystem - publishers, consumer platforms, and creators. What type of content will work best using Accelerated Mobile Pages? The goal is for all published content, from news stories to videos and from blogs to photographs and GIFs source: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/support/faqs.html

I agree with Gaston, but usually the SEO benefits that you will see are rather small. This was a tactic that was used a couple of years ago to just buy a bunch of domains that already have a ton of links to them and then just point them to your main root domain. Usually the easiest signal to look at is already to see if you suddenly start redirecting certain URLs to another page.

Hi Simon, It's not looking great. I don't have any inside information from Bing / Microsoft, but there seem to be SNI pages that are still not being indexed correctly. See, for example, this page: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/05/09/if_you_can_read_this_youre_sniing which is nowhere to be found in Bing's index. A site: search on bing finds two posts from the mnot site (out of hundreds). So it appears likely to still be flaky but I haven't gone down the rabbit hole of looking for other reasons that site may not be indexed, nor checked that it actually is using SNI. I also don't have an SNI site to test things on, so that's the best I have for you, I'm afraid. The only other link I found that may be interesting is this page claiming that SNI is supported by bing: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/viewClient.html?name=BingPreview&version=Jan%202015 Sorry that's not more useful. You could reach out to the author of that SEL post (Ben Goodsell) and see if he's seen any changes since he wrote it.

I no this question is bit old, however I found it relevant to my own site, All I can say is... breath take stock and focus on the task in hand. what I mean by that is try not to get wrap in the world of seo yes most things are the same. however there's about a million ways of doing these things. I found it better to concentrate on one task at a time, like doing all top titles & meta tags. its hard as its only me doing the website whilst doing a full time job. however like they say Rome was built in a day and it will all come good one day lol good luck