Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I just used it today. The simple crawl is free. Advanced is paid.

Hi, Can I ask what leads you to believe search engines aren't crawling/indexing the site? When I search site:www.bugsanonymousil.com in Google, I'm seeing 62 pages from the site showing up in the index. One BIG problem with the site, though, is it looks like when someone requests an estimate, a webpage is generated for them - and these pages are being indexed with customers' names, addresses, email, and phone numbers. You should definitely remove those URLs from the index in Google Search Console, and update the site so that those pages aren't crawlable/indexable.

I'm not sure why you would want to do this, you use a canonical when page A and B are more or less the same and you want Google to index only page A. When page A and page B are different, a canonical would make no sense and Google will probably ignore it.

Thanks. I was concerned about the URL because I've read several articles that state adaptive and responsive designs use the same URL whereas mobile dedicated is a different url, usually a subdomain of the root domain. The developers are telling me we have an "adaptive design", but the mobile site is a subdoman setup, where the URL structure for the homepage, some navigational pages and search are different than the desktop site. If you go to a webpage on a mobile phone and it redirects you to a subdomain with a mobile setup, that sounds mobile dedicated to me, and not "adaptive".... but maybe I am having a hard time grasping the true definition of adaptive. http://conversionsciences.com/blog/the-make-or-break-differences-between-responsive-adaptive-mobile-optimized-websites/ http://www.clickseed.com/responsive-design-vs-separate-mobile-site-vs-dynamic-serving/

It is dangerous if you simply move the content to another domain and don't have plans to implement redirects, etc. It isn't "dangerous" if done correctly. A well executed migration may see a drop in traffic for a 2-6 weeks (ballpark) and then things should settle back in to normal levels. It's going to depend on the size of the site and the complexity of the migration (content being eliminated, added, massive URL structure changes, etc). Here are some good migration resources: Domain Migration Checklist Domain Migration Lessons How to Change Domain Names and Keep Rankings

This is brilliant info John, thank you so much. Could you clarify what you mean by "Think about a) sending small amounts of traffic to your new pages to track conversions and interaction and b) you can expose some specific pages to the search engines to see how the search engines treat them. This would be very hard to do with a separate site." ? Are you suggesting rolling out the new site page by page would be better than all at once? That wouldn't be possible if rolling out the site on the current domain... It would be great to get a proper handle on exactly what you mean. Thanks for the contact info- I will be in touch!

Hi Alan and Jordan, Firstly, Alan, thanks for raising this question as I am currently in a similar predicament and was wondering if Jordan, you could provide some insight? For my website, which is the site for a magazine I work for, the current URL structure is www.website.com/article-title On first glance, I thought it must be that we would have to re-structure the URLs to include the category structure, for example... www.website.com/category/sub-category/article-title However, upon deeper investigation, I've seen that we do actually have breadcrumbs enabled therefore google is indexing and following the structure from this. With this in mind, is it actually worth re-structuring the URLs to include these categories as it will take a long time to organise and implement. Obviously, thinking in terms of UX, it is a must-do, but I'm just trying to weigh up the pro's and cons with this.. Appreciate your help, Leigh

Thank you, the title should be consistent with the content of the page.

Hey! why don't you write three pages? C being your number one page linking out to A and B? That way you are explaining the relationship of the services to the customer and to Google.  Win win?

Hey there, in addition to Oleg's comment you can add an htpasswd file to your server to require a username and password to be entered before any users or robots are allowed to access your website. You can find information on setting this up here.

Hey Sean, Left a message for you in your private inbox, feel free to reach out any time! All the best, Rob

Does anyone know how many domains you can have under the business plan? Is that just for one site?

I believe it depends on the user visibility of the H1 tag. It's fine to make H1 tags smaller and in odd positions - it would be difficult for Google to be overly punitive on creative design of this sort. I've created H1's smaller than H3s on many occassions. The question for me would be - is the new H1 the same or very similar colour to the background? Is it in an incredibly small font? Google is wise to attempts to "almost hide" content. I would ask why the SEO can't be more creative and make the content more visible. If h1 tag and keyword in it isn't appropriate there is something wrong with the overall content or keyword choice for the page.

Nope - I would always defer to what is better for the user. Remember that whilst there are many components of the algorithm that analyse the page there are also parts that look at engagement - if the changes have a positive impact on engagement and UX as suspected then I would not fear some algorithmic punishment. Always, always test. Roll it out. Decide on your metrics and test the results by those measurements of what success looks like. If it has a negative impact on ranking or engagement then reconsider - you can always roll back. It's very easy to get into analysis paralysis when worrying about the search ranking algorithm - do what is right by your users first and you won't go far wrong. Hope that helps Marcus

As I said use robots.txt or htaccess rules for bots, where you would be able to allow access to specific bots like seofrog (at least temporary). Or, maybe they can allow seofrog to crawl it temporarily or something. As for Google bot - try to "fetch as google" within Google Search console. See what response there is.

Hi Bob, Like so many things in SEO, I'd be looking at this from a UX point of view first and foremost, then do a quick revision through your SEO glasses before implementing. Will making this H1 change help or hinder your user experience? To offer my own opinion in response to this question, I think the answer is 'hinder'. As a user I would much rather see just the name of the shoe both on the category page and in the H1 of the product page. It's clean, succinct and doesn't feel like someone had an SEO agenda when they crafted it. I'd even go so far as to say I'd think twice before handing over my credit card details to a site that used product titles like "Adidas Action Series Shoes size 5 through 10 for running, walking, and hiking" rather than simply "Adidas Action Series". Even the word "shoes" is quite redundant here in my opinion. To give you an idea of a website that ranks very well in this field in Australia, check out HypeDC. They're not our client, nor have they ever been but they deserve that link because they do a great job in most areas and they highlight my point. They sell shoes (and all things shoe-like... sneakers, boots etc) and yet they don't jam the word(s) into every title, heading and paragraph they can. If you're looking at the Nike Air Huarache Ultra shoe, that shoe's product title on the category page is simply "Nike Air Huarache Ultra". That's it. No mention of shoe, shoes, running, walking, hiking, footwear etc. The page title is almost identical and even the content on the product page has no mention of the word shoe! While I wouldn't necessarily recommend avoiding the keyword like they have, it's a clear demonstration that Google understands your website as a whole so there's no need to go jamming all those keywords everywhere. Craft a pleasant user experience and make sure your website in clear, as a single unit, what you do. You may be wondering how the hell HypeDC ranks so well without using the keyword even once? All I can offer is external suggestions but I'd say it's a combination of the following: They don't sell 'cheap shoes' so they know their target audience are "shoe people" who are pretty likely to know what they want already so I'd expect the search volume of specific shoe models is quite high. Just referencing the specific model on a product page likely works in their favor for these searches. Their link profile is highly relevant, as is their anchor profile. This means from the link profile alone Google can start to understand that HypeDC = shoe store. They have no shortage of pages on the site that relate directly to things in the shoe industry. A "shoe size guide", a bunch of shoe questions in the FAQ, a page for each of their shoe manufacturers etc. I'm sure there are plenty more but this post is already getting long (sorry!) but you get the picture. Don't get caught up in "where and how exactly should I place my keyword in this element to appease the Google Gods?", just make a user friendly website and 9 times out of 10 you will have made a well-optimised one by accident! I realise shoes is possibly not even your vertical but I'm just working with the example at hand. Everything I've just said can be applied to any industry because the core principles don't change. I hope this helps!

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that, probably depends on your search term. For SEO as a search term here in the UK I am getting 6 with www., 2 without and 1 using another subdomain. For "us election" all but one use www (the one that doesn't uses another subdomain). I am not aware of any preference by Google, however, you should be consistent in your use (in canonical tags, sitemap etc), and make sure the one you don't opt for 301 redirects to the other.

Now that I check rankings for isacleanse.co.nz (without the www.) the keywords are all ranking in the same spot they used to be... so what I can gather there is no issue but instead my 'rank tracker' for keywords within MOZ was updating the rankings for a www. when the rankings have now moved to the non www. site? Does that make sense? I've now reinstated back the www. before the domain name as I prefer it this way. I will still make those changes that you've mentioned above! Much appreciated