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I am currently wrestling with this same question, just slightly different keywords and context. This was a very interesting debate in this thread, so I am hoping I can encourage some fresh perspectives and also perhaps just to check back in after a couple of years now to see if opinions about this have evolved. In my current situation, I am trying to decide between: Shop [furniture category] | [parent category] | {store name}  , OR [furniture category] | [parent category] | [store name] From keyword research, I do understand that nobody is searching for "shop" in their queries. However, the search results when searching for [furniture category] include a lot of different types of results for different intent. For example, when simply searching for the category name, page 1 results include retailers, manufacturers, professional review sites, informational articles, how-to articles, etc. The specific product category is a niche with a lot of information, news, comparative reviews and is a bit of a longer purchase cycle with research. We've noticed that after performing a few searches in a row, the page 1 results change a bit, seeming to adjust a little to intent (buy vs research vs news) With regard to prefixing the title tags with "shop", the arguments in favor of that right now are: signaling to search engines that the page is a commerce site to match user intent to searchers who are likely shopping (even if not by their immediate query, but by search their behavior) standing out in the results (for CTR purpose) for a commerce-focused shopper, so they can easily distinguish places to buy (e.g. some of the manufacturer sites, even big names, don't actually sell their furniture online) On the other side of the argument: Occurrence of keywords "shop" or "buy" in the queries is very low, almost nil Most of the top pages in the results don't prefix, even the retailers and direct-to-consumer manufacturers Opinions? Any data?

You may need to enable canonical headers on your CDN. This post has more information about how to do that. It's geared toward MaxCDN and WPEngine but should give you the general idea.

I find the bounce rate can vary greatly on what type of page it is. If it's a landing page for a nice bit of hero content, 90% is a lot and it's possible there's something blocking users from achieving what they were hoping to do on your page. But if you're looking specifically at blog/article content you do tend to see pages that are ranking well with bounce rates between 70-90%. A lot of the time this means there's nothing wrong with the page, the user has just gone "Hey great, this page has answered my question" and left. You might be able to gauge whether this is the case by looking at time spent on page - if people are reading your content this should show it and it's a ranking factor in itself, so as long as your page is answering people's queries and they're taking the time to read it, you might find it stays in its current position. Here's a simple, but often forgotten tip for lowering down bounce rates: make sure you're actually giving the user somewhere to go after visiting your page. If there's another relevant piece of content on your site that might help broaden their understanding of the topic or what seems like the next logical step in the 'user journey', make sure it gets a link on the page somewhere that it's likely to be seen, whether it's at the end of the page or in its own CTA that stands out. Hope that helps!

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Hi there! I would recommend you follow these steps: 1. Perform On-Page SEO There are many SEO tactics you can perform on each of your website pages to increase their rank in search engines and get more visitors. This includes producing high-quality content that your audience is searching for, and writing concise meta descriptions for your pages. The meta description appears below your URL in search results. Knowing what a page is about and what will result in a click makes users much more likely to do so. 2. Get Listed Another way to increase traffic to your website is to get listed in online directories and review sites. For most of these sites, your profile will have a link to your website, so actively updating these listings and getting positive reviews is likely to result in more website traffic. 3. Post to Social Media with Hashtags Use social media to promote blog posts and other useful content on your website. This way you can get your social media followers to your site, as well as users in your followers’ networks who share your content. 4. Use Landing Pages Create landing pages specific to your offers, such as for redeeming discount codes, downloading a free guide, or starting a free trial. Landing pages are another source of traffic to your website. Plus, they contain the details users need in order to move forward and convert. 5. Target Long-Tail Keywords While short-tail keywords are often searched more frequently, it is more difficult to rank for them on search engines. Targeting long-tail keywords, on the other hand, gives you a better chance of ranking higher (even on the first page) for queries specific to your products and services—and higher ranking means more traffic. Plus, as search engines and voice-to-text capabilities advance, people are using more specific phrases to search online. 6. Start Email Marketing Sending out regular newsletters and promoting offers through email is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and can also help to get traffic to your website. Provide useful information and links to pages on your website where they can learn more, such as through blog posts and offer landing pages. Just make sure that you don`t continually bombard your readers with emails or your customers will either disengage with, delete, or unsubscribe from your emails. 7. Advertise Online Online advertising is perhaps the most basic way to get more people to visit your site. Social media, paid search, and display advertising are all excellent channels for PPC advertising to boost website traffic. 8. Guest Blog Having a micro-influencer publish a blog post on your site can help to increase your web traffic, as they are likely to share the post with their large audience. It can also help to add more variety to your content and show your visitors that you are active in your field. Alternatively, you could ask the influencer to mention your business in their own review or round-up post, or you could turn an interview with the influencer into a blog post that is likely to get traffic. 9. Engage Online Be active in online groups and on websites that are relevant to your business and community. Comment on blogs and social media posts, answer questions people are posting, and participate in conversations about your industry. The more you engage with your community, the more exposure and profile visits you get. If your social media profiles contain a link to your website, then you’ve turned your engagement into another channel for website traffic. Just be sure to engage moderately and in a sincere way, and avoid including links to your website in your comments 10. Learn from Your Analytics Use tracked links for your marketing campaigns and regularly check your website analytics. This will enable you to identify which strategies and types of content work, which ones need improvement, and which ones you should not waste your time on. I hope I've helped

Hi Chris You do mention Locksmith Services a lot on the homepage and in the title: "Home & Commercial Safes, 24/7 Locksmith Services | Houston Safe & Lock If the intention is to rank for 'Houston Locksmith' then you did a pretty good job on ranking the homepage! If you really want to change this, I suggest you remove reference to the specific service in the title and H1 and around 12 other mentions on the homepage without links and confine them to the in-line page. The other alternative would be to canonicalise the inline page to the homepage which should push that even higher as it is not conflicting with the inline.Sometimes this is a good idea if you have two very similar pages but only want one of them to appear in search results. The inline page being an internal page which visitors can click on when they get to the page. It's a small conundrum but easily fixed. Kind Regards Nigel

Hi There, This is exactly what the hreflang tag is for, to tell Google that each subfolder and page is targeting a different country and possibly language, and so is not duplicate content. The SEO agency is not giving you the right information so you should fire them! If a pages exists like this: yourstore.com/au/category/product-1 yourstore.com/us/category/product-1 yourstore.com/ca/category/product-1 yourstore.com/uk/category/product-1 As long as every page has an hreflang tag pointing to itself and the other versions you will be absolutely fine, no duplication, no worries! Read More https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en I hope that helps, Regards Nigel

You could do that or keep the core domain for Australia as the.com and then add youstore.com/uk/ youstore.com/us/ Then as you say have IP detection to flick them over to the correct version. Like Fitflop.com They have the .com for the US and then it flicks depending where you are. If you change the .com to .com/au you would need to install a lot of redirects which isn't necessary. Regards Nigel

I don't think so - you can leave as is. At some time in the future if you start adding a lot of countries it might look more sensible, but I wouldn't do it straight away. Regards Nigel

Hello Nigel, Thank you for your feedback, I agree it is thought to beat tripadvisor but I am confident you can with good content. I will try and see if I manage too. Cheers,

Yeah, of course I can explain more. HTTP 410 status code tells google that you've eliminated that page and will never be live again. So google will kill that URL in its database and never ever crawl it again. Thus said, GoogleBot follows assumptions that site is working poorly or that there is some big problem. How can this happen? when you have a massive amount of 404, 301 redirects, 410, 5xx you might have your site downgraded, possible deindexed, reduced bot crawling frequency or any other penalty you might imagine. Some info about 410 status code: HTTP/1.1 status code definitions Hope it helps. Best luck. GR

Sure thing! If for any reason, that doesn't work out for you, please feel free to come back here.

Maybe by the 2020's we'll have moved away from link based indexing entirely? Definitely, agree with the AI angle - there is so much at work in the background (and foreground) now. We're already in the era of voice (this article outlines how voice search is changing SEO)!

Hey! You can find you SEO competitors in a few steps with  Keyword Explorer, which is included in our Moz Pro subscription. 1. Enter your site into Keyword Explorer https://moz.com/explorer/site/overview 2. Select and search a keyword that you’re ranking on the top page for (the top 10 results) 3. Click SERP Analysis 4. Save the top ranking URLs You can do the same for a target keyword 1. Enter your target keyword  into Keyword Explorer https://moz.com/explorer/site/overview 2. Click on SERP Analysis 3. Save the top ranking URLs You can then go on to find competitor overlap to build on your keyword lists and get content ideas. 1. Enter your site into Keyword Explorer 2. Enter two of the competitors URLs that you just collected 3. Click on the Venn diagram to see the areas of most overlap to see keywords the top ratings urls also rank for 4. Use this ideas to build keyword lists, add them to your Campaign to track and optimise your content. Any further questions, feel free to reach out to help@moz.com

Glad to hear it's working now! Thank you for following up to let us know.

Great to see a company actually adjusting to the needs of their users in a timely fashion. Well done Moz and I am really loving the new Moz Link Explorer as well! Keep up the awesome tools and SEO articles!

Thanks, Tawny is a pleasure to contribute to this community