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Becky, I think Sean has given you some great advice. I'd just like to add a few things. I have seen rankings drop when sites add a bunch (thousands) of products with manufacturer descriptions and allow them to be indexed. I have seen rankings rise when these are either removed from the index, or improved with unique copy. However, you have the manufacturer description so why not leverage it? One idea I have proposed to a few clients is to use that as the description provided to channel partners, affiliates and sites like Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping. Let them deal with the duplicate content while you keep yours unique. Otherwise you'll write all of that unique copy and within months they'll all have it on their sites (because you gave it to them in feeds) and that hard work and money will have been for nothing.

Thank you RedSweater, #1 In general, in our case same filters would apply for all / unique categories. So I assume we would use them all #2 For the issue about having same content on All Filtered vs Category page. Wouldn't this be solved with Canonical URLs? e.g. we currently have this URL: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale/2/Electronics.html?hideSearchBox=false&keywords=&cid=2&facetNameValue=Category_value_+Electronics with the same content as: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale/2/Electronics.html But both have Canonical for the 2nd. Just to make sure, is that SEO-friendly? #3 Isn't including keywords in URL a best practice though? See point 3 here: https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls Also considering URLs wouldn't be too long, e.g. less than 100 characters See point 6 here: https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls #4 I think that could work. Just to make sure, what is PDP? Cheers,

Great thanks, we use to but we don't anymore. Why would this show under my organic segment if it's paid? I'll look over the resources thank you

If you want to rank for local you should try to implement schemas at your website. Another option is to make a research of your competition. So if you are in the second position why don't you are making a research about the first place? backlinks / anchor text / referring sites. Instead of trying to optimize everything, I always try to optimize those factor that will help to beat the competitor next to me on the top.

Good answer. I didn't think about looking at top pages or fetch and render. Interesting finds there, for sure. The top 10 pages according to OSE are: http://mywebsite.com/ http://mywebsite.com/?id=P8426&shouldPaginate=true&categoryId=3865 http://mywebsite.com/?cbg_tz=360 http://mywebsite.com/ISES-Wedding2008_Ritz/index.html http://mywebsite.com/about/40_0_916.html http://mywebsite.com/all-dolled-up/15_8_585.html http://mywebsite.com/beautifully-human/21_17_487.html http://mywebsite.com/belly-and-baby/20_13_371.html http://mywebsite.com/belly-and-baby/20_15_373.html http://mywebsite.com/belly-and-baby/20_28_409.html #1 is the homepage, it's fine. #2-#4 are duplicates of the homepage... have no idea how/when those were created. The remainder are all very odd 404 URLs. When put into fetch and render, #1 and #5-#10 show what is expected. #2-#4 show as a redirect to the homepage (yet, I get a 404). When I check #2-#4 in a response header tool, like SEOBook, it shows redirects to some other odd page (http://www.mywebsite.com/xmlrpc.php). That I know of, there hasn't been a penalty message in GWT. I say that because there is no message in GWT, and the client hasn't reported seeing any message prior to this happening. Thanks for the feedback Carson, I appreciate it. I like the story about the IP address being tracked back to a competitor - sneaky!

My pleasure, Paul. Have a nice weekend!

Hey Brett! Thanks so much for updating this thread. I like the answer you received, but I wish very much that it was coming directly from a Google staffer. I don't in any way doubt that what the volunteer is saying is true ... I'd just have preferred it if he mentioned he took the issue to staff to get an official answer. Hmm ... this is not an easy one!

The issue of the internal links of your site going through 301-redirects isn't being caused by the htaccess file, John - in fact that file is partially saving you from the bigger issue. The problem is that your WordPress migration to HTTPS was incomplete. After the migration, you missed the step of going through the WP database and changing all the static URLs to the HTTPS versions as well. This can be done using a mySQL query through phpMyAdmin, but the easiest way is to use the Better Search Replace plugin. (You need to be sure you're correctly handling serialised data, which the plugin does automatically.) In addition, you're going to want to insure that you've updated the WordPress Address URL and the Site URL in Settings > General to the HTTPS versions of the URLs. The final check will then be to make certain all the static assets loaded by the site (and any referenced from 3rd parties) are also being loaded over HTTPS as well. Watch especially for 3rd party form codes like newsletter subscription forms, social media widgets, and other widgets in sidebars as these aren't caught by the rewrite plugin I mentioned earlier. This step is essential to insure you don't have "mixed content" on the pages which cause you to get a non-secure warning from the browser. You may have used a "Switch to HTTPS" plugin for this process initially, but the majority of those don't accomplish their task in the most SEO-effective way. Using the method outlines above will both make the search engines happier,and will make for faster webpage performance as well. Let me know if you have further questions. Paul

Great question! It's generally considered best practice for agencies to have one Foursquare user account (profile) per brand/client that they are managing listings for. Since clients leave agencies all of the time, it is likely easiest to simply create a Foursquare user profile (using a new gmail, for example), then oAuth and claim the locations with it through the app. That way, if a client leaves, you can easily turn over the email account that is managing those listings to the brand. This avoids the hassle of having to go through the steps of reassigning and/or relinquishing management of those Foursquare listings.

Hey MV - What you say here I don't think is the correct way to be thinking about it: "My thought would have been that the sub domain is only as good as the main domain and in this case the main domain isn't strong because little or no content is hosted on it." As I said in my original comment, there isn't really a "main domain" with a technical implementation. Your subdomain should be able to rank just fine as long as it is the canonical, has links to it, and the migration was done correctly from the old to the new. I still suspect that there are a lot of links left to the old site setup that are not yet benefitting where your site is now. A subdomain is a separate site from another subdomain, so site.domain.com is different from www.domain.com and has its own ranking potential. Links to www.domain.com may have a knockon effect for ranking site.domain.com, but you also need links to site.domain.com to really be able to rank.

Hi Kay, Using third party sites such as Feefo to collect reviews is still good practice. You can collect reviews on both your overall service and individual products with them. Their full integration looks like the best method. As well as that, JSON is a little easier on your website so won't affect your page speed. It's usually a little easier to integrate as well. When you use Feefo as well you can mark your site up with schema markup and include your reviews to become eligible for organic stars. Hope this helps!

I'm sure it would probably be valuable and pass on some SEO benefit but if it's likely that someone has purchased this domain purely for transferring the link equity of inbound links to your website, then there's always a chance that this is going to be picked up on. A small chance, but a chance nonetheless.

Hi Becky Along with Sean's message above, a tool I highly recommend is Panguin Tool. You can line up your Analytics along side algorithm updates and go into much more detail about what updates may have helped boost your rankings. Hope this helps! Good luck! Patrick

thanks, that was a help

Thanks!