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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

Like Sean said, running an OSE report on the domain could help get some metrics. The problem though is that it's likely that there are domains disavowed that are not in the Moz list of backlinks for that site. Ahrefs does have a bulk upload of urls/domains that you can do and get metrics back. That might be useful. With that said, however, I rarely make disavow decisions based on metrics alone. I'd want to see the link itself. Still, I think what you're trying to do is trim the list down so that you can manually review links that are potentially good. A little shameless self plug here...my disavow blacklist tool might help. I've got tens of thousands of domains in my blacklist that I almost always disavow. You can run a domain across my tool here. I have a paid version of the tool that would allow you to upload the entire list of domains that are in your disavow file and it will give you a CSV of which ones are blacklisted by me. You can find that here. There are some domains that are whitelisted on my bulk disavow upload such as ones that link out to everyone like aboutus.org or alexa and others. You could then just look at the domains that are not on my blacklist/whitelist. That could give you a smaller list to sort through.

Hi Kristina, Thanks for the reply! I think that helps (in the sense I now know how messy our site structure is...). As I think any more conversation will get very site specific, I'll continue this with moz help

Hi Rob, Virginia & others, I know this question and answer is way over a year old, however it's in my opinion still highly relevant. I just read this article, suggesting that a gTLD is better than having ccTLD's when wanting to become multinational. https://www.branded3.com/blog/choose-subdomain-subfolder-cctld-international/ I have a small startup project with a patio heater company, where I have a gTLD (.com) and right now also a ccTLD (.dk). These two domains of course link to each other but infact they are two separate Shopify stores. DA is around 20 on the ccTLD and 10 on gTLD. Now I want to expand to Poland, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands (I have purchased these ccTLD's), so my question is now, which is to prefer SEO-wise for the optimal setup in each country? Go with the gTLD and having the other languages served as de.domain.com, pl.domain.com etc.? Having a CNAME setup on each ccTLD, so the shop will be on domain.pl, domain.de etc. and still "in the background" being served from the gTLD? I hope somebody can point me in the right direction. Best regards, Jens

It should be noted that individuals searching long tail keywords are likely farther down an acquisition funnel and more apt to perform an action. Example: "shoes" gets millions of searches a month, is very competitive, but broad/vague. "Women's red Nike running shoes size 6" is a specific, low competition, long tail search. This individual knows exactly what they are looking for and are more apt to purchase. While this isn't always the case, many companies have become successful by leveraging long tail queries. Amazon being the biggest! Chris Anderson's The Long Tail better describes this phenomenon. There are more long tail searches than there are fat head (short tail) searches. So if you can invest some keyword research muscle into understanding where your long tail keyword opportunities are, and then provide the best resources/content to deliver that information to users, you'll site will be better set up for success.

Hi Imran - Oh, that must be frustrating! Have you tried contacting the theme developer for support? You may also be able to get guidance in the Shopify forum, especially if you are using a more common theme.

It's been about 4 months since you've noted this problem. How is it looking for you now? I'm curious if your rankings came back and whether or not you took action to get them back.

Hi Joao, One thing that you might try to do to differentiate the content from search engines' perspective is add schema markup designed for job postings. Schema helps search engines understand what the content on a page is or is describing, and you can specify things like: Date posted (do you have this information if you are pulling from a newspaper?) Experience requirements Hiring organization Industry Job location Job title The date the offer expires Adding this information will give search engines much more context about what the content is about, and may help your issue. Hope this helps!

Thanks! Now I understand the main difference a lot better!

Howdy. As you said, it will depend on the industry. But not only. It will depend on type of service/product you offer. Example: direct purchase of simple thing like a tshirt or mug or whatever, when people wouldn't have any questions, phone conversion will be really low, since the only people calling will be somewhat unqualified buyers. Here is how we do it. So, on a landing page we have landing page specific phone number with tracking (use Twilio). And all sales are tracked in the admin. So, if someone calls, using this phone number, and makes a purchase, we have a logged time of that call and time of the purchase, placed by representative. All we have to do is match it. You can do it manually or with some script. In terms of ballpark of conversion rate, it's typically 30% from landing page. Depending on the industry of course. So, that's average rate. Therefore if you know rate for the form, you'll be able to calculate avg conversion rate for calls. Hope this makes sense

No problem

Absolutely

Thank you very much! I'm going to recommend a target of 2 sec with an average between 2 - 5 sec and 800ms for first visual. I'll let them know that they can accomplish reducing page size by: leveraging browser caching setting up HTTP caching optimizing images using gzip compression minifying CSS combining javascript files using a CDN to serve static files

Thank you everyone. I think this client is small enough and with only three locations, we're safe to proceed with Google Voice for now.

Howdy. The strategy is the same as Reputation Management. See where the ranked images are coming from (your website, other websites, social media etc), see the topics of those pages, and see the anchor text cloud for those pages. Basically, besides the alt tag, it's topical and semantic correlation of the page, which is tied to the images as well. As far as I understand, if page ranks for the query, images on that page will rank as well (or at least will have a high chance). Then start building links with proper anchor texts to other pages and websites, which you want it to rank for that query Hope this helps.

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.

Hey Rik, Have you reached out to the Yoast team (either via yoast.com or @yoast), they're very responsive folks and always willing to help out. Martijn.