Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there, Just checking in to see if you looked through the things Kevin mentioned and if you are still experiencing the indexation problem after the HTTPS switch? Cheers, Jane

Hi tahirekhanvc, I'm a big fan of Matt Cutts, and you should be, too. Check out what he has to say about duplicate content: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319706/Googles-Matt-Cutts-A-Little-Duplicate-Content-Wont-Hurt-Your-Rankings I had a similar issue with a client a year or so ago. As I'm sure you know, secure pages are encrypted and need to be decrypted, which takes more time and requires more resources. And with that, speed may become an issue, and speed is a ranking factor. A good rule of thumb is to secure pages that communicate private data, i.e. contact pages, carts, etc. If you are offering some sort of security service, or if your business model requires earning a great deal of trust from your visitors, then go secure the site. Now I'm talking about sites like https://squareup.com/ (FYI, I actually do not recommend that service but you can see the home page is secure). And that company actually takes it one step further with an EV SSL, where you can show your company name in the green bar. Go for a purpose, but not SEO in particular. Matt went over this about the time Facebook switched to https. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801641 Now it's up to you to make the call, but make it and stick with it. What you don't want to do is go back and forth a couple times trying to rank better thinking that this is a major problem.

You could use the Segment dropdown to see the data by Network. It will display 3 rows, so you can see that broken down. You cannot however, isolate the Search Partners using a filter. It'd be a good request to make to Google.

Hi Jason, If you use the unique ccTLDs and the href lang / rel="alternative" tag, this duplication will be fine. The tag was brought out in late 2011 and tells Google: "just because this content is the same on an Australian site, a British site and an American site, this is okay - it has been done on purpose." You can also use it to point to direct translations, e.g. "this Spanish content is the same as this English content over here, but one is meant for the UK and one for Argentina." Lastly, you can also use this tag as mark up to say "This is French content meant for Canada, and this English content over here is also meant for Canada". More information about the tag is available here and here. Cheers, Jane

Hi there, Thanks for reaching out! We did actually push out some updates to the On Page Grader at the end of March. You can get a full rundown of the changes on our Help Hub. Hope this helps and have a great day!

If they are tags then they should show up in the tag section of Posts or possibly in the comments. Not sure if you allow uploads to your site, but if you do you should check out the upload folder(s). Keep in mind, these URLs could be showing up somewhere out in cyberspace, not necessarily on your site. Take those steps I pointed out and you should see those ugly URLs go away within a few weeks, not accounting for other factors.

Hi Kevin, Thank you for contributing your thoughts. I think keywords in URL's are useful in two ways 1. They give an indication to users what the page is about 2. They give an indication to search engines what the page is about Although the keywords "Cane wood furniture for sale" can be used in the Meta Title, H1 tag and onsite content, I don't see any harm in adding them to the URL as an additional indicator, other than the downside of increasing the URL length. So I suppose it depends on whether google gives more preference to keywords in URL's over their length or vice versa

Thank you. Will have to study this

Hi Denverish, thanks for your reply, been months since i looked at this problem. It has returned so trying to sort it out. the redirects mentioned did not work. so any suggestions. The CMS allows for 301 redirects via a form; place old url at the top of the form and the new url at the bottom and save, But as I am trying to create a wildcard 301 redirect, i am not sure what code to place in these fields..see pic tai MgrqdVB.png

Hi there, I'd echo the points above regarding on and off page, especially off page: a poorly optimised site from an on-page perspective can gain rankings based on its great backlink profile. A perfect website with perfectly optimised pages will not rank if it does have links. Have you engaged in any link development during the fours months? Along with looking at the points Erwan raised, I would look at the backlink profiles of your competitors in the area and decide on a 12 month goal for how many links you need and from which types of sites. Have a look at the link development category on the Moz blog for years worth of good ideas as well.

Hi Christoph, It's certainly true that there's a lot of room for improvement, even given the page you're working with right now. As Martijn notes, this image includes text that could be incorporated as HTML - whether you use image replacement, HTML 5, etc., a basic like this means that Google understands nothing about what the image is about / says. In general, creating a page with more "text" on it (or, more specifically, a page set up in a way that makes it easier for Google to understand all of its content) is beneficial. It may not make a marked, noticeable difference to traffic straight away, but the site / page has the likelihood to rank for more terms if you include all its terms as readable text.

Hi Gavo, Just want to be sure that in addition to changing your address on your Google listing, you've also been cleaning up any other citations that reference the old address. I'm asking this because it's so important to understand that Google also draws their information from third party sources, beyond simply relying on what the business owner says in his dashboard. Yes, it can take some time to see the change. If you don't see the change within 10 days, you may need to take further steps.

Hi Joanne, I don't think it's just the spammy titles, I also think it's the length of the titles, best below 55 char. I would suggest something simpler and but the title's you suggested as Meta Description instead. "Coconut Oil - <you company="" name="">" would be sufficient as a title.</you> If the domain is an Australian domain then you don't need Australia in the title, also you may want to restrict your audience to Australia perhaps, dependent on your market. Good Luck

I'm not the business owner and part of my position is to get our website positioned as high as possible but not sure how honestly. Would you care to elaborate on what's wrong with the site? I feel like something is wrong but not really sure what and would love to an expert's point of view.

Hi Robert, In general I would agree with Moosa, however, in this situation I think a drop-down menu is not the best choice. I think I understand why you want customers to be able to choose from the category page. It's most likely that there are a lot of colors to choose from, which means any drop down menu would be extremely long, and the presentation on the category page is quite attractive. Yes, the individual product pages are duplicate content, so you have a few options. Since your main content and color choices really live on the category page, you could do as Travis suggested and use the category page URL as your canonical URL for all the separate color product pages. In addition to that, if your preference is really that potential customers find the category page first and foremost, and you really aren't that concerned with them finding a page for an individual color, you could add a rel="follow, noindex" attribute to those pages as well, which would keep them out of the SERPs. However, if you are wanting to rank for longer tail search terms containing individual colors, this may not be the way to go. In that case, simply using the canonical should work. Still, those individual product pages may end up in Google's supplemental index with you category page being the favored result. All that being said, this scenario is extremely common on eCommerce sites. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a duplicate content "penalty" per se. There may be negative fallout from situations like this, i.e. the wrong page ranking for a certain term, your crawl bandwidth being eaten up by many pages that are similar, etc. But I would make that secondary to the most important thing: What method will make it fastest and easiest for your customers to find exactly what they want? Do that, and then use some of the techniques mentioned to handle the SERPs. Hope that helps! Dana

Thank you

Another vote for WhiteSpark. And don't forget, you can get a deal on WhiteSpark using your Moz Perks. Paul