Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Bob, The URL that displays next to the keyword and ranking will be the page of your website that ranks highest for that keyword. This isn't always necessarily the page that you want to be ranking, and may commonly be the homepage instead of the target landing page. You will have to use your own insight, data and SEO skills to decide whether the target landing page should be ranking instead of the homepage - and strategise a way to optimise your landing page and deoptimise the homepage for that keyword.

Good question, one that I don't feel like gets addressed enough. Yes, you should always include self-referring canonical tags. There's a few reasons for this, but primary it helps one version of your URLs get indexed. Here's a handful of cases where they're helpful: Some CMSs create URLs that are case-sensitive - i.e. URLs will resolve at /Some-page, /some-page, and /Some-Page HTTP vs. HTTPS - if you've gone secure, self-referring canonical tags can help search engines learn your new structure and drop HTTP URLs from the index quicker, or at least prevent both secure and non-secure from being indexed Absolute/Relative links - some development teams prefer to use relative URLs in links when working in Dev and Test environments, this is helpful for preventing unwanted Dev/Test URLs from getting indexed, but isn't ideal for SEO. This is where self-referring canonicals come in. WWW vs. Non-WWW - another safeguard to prevent indexing of both versions, even with redirects in place, it doesn't hurt to have a fall back URLs with Parameters - If your site appends parameters to URLs for any reason, self-referring canonicals will prevent indexation of /this-page?q=123 There's probably other reasons to add to this list, but these should be compelling enough to go ahead and add them.

Hi Silviu, My apologies for the delayed response, google is considering your mobile version as the primary version of the website, since it doesn't project the two version of the website. I would suggest getting your website URL structure reviewed from a SEO professional, along with a detailed SEO audit as there can be other aspects which might  be impacting SEO of your website. Feel free to respond and ask further questions. Regards, Vijay

Hi Ray, I check your website on google and then it's codes. It seems, the description is being picked from a |   | Rename the DIV to something different. Regards, Vijay

Hi Ana, Please check this article for Wordpress optimisation guide here on the Moz blog.  It explains in detail problems with tags and the best practices to use them.  Usually, you want to noindex the tags on your WP site - keep them for navigation purposes if you want, but letting them be indexed can lead to duplicate content issues. If you are already getting some traffic on Tag pages, you can 301 to them right pages. I hope this helps. Regards, Vijay

Hi There, Yes, pages with less content and only images can hurt your site's SEO. Another problem with portfolio pages is that with the limited content, similar title and description, they might look as duplicate to search engines. I have a client who had limited content on product pages, we had great success in SEO after adding a unique description to pages. Best to handle the situation is to use a portfolio main page with unique on-page content. I hope this helps. Please respond if you have further questions. Regards, Vijay

Hi Kelly, A couple of inputs for you looks like you indexing your checkout pages , I would 'noindex, nofollow' cart pages as they are just going to dilute your authority through those extra pages. Also, check whether you are following the right URL structure for pages https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls https://moz.com/learn/seo/url I hope this helps. Thanks, Vijay

Hi Matthew, Our job as SEOs is to try and get authority for a website on keywords relevant to their niche. We do that by using related topics on blog, on-page SEO with right title, Headers, content on the pages etc. We analyze the results on SERPs, organic keyword traffics in analytics etc., to understand whether our strategy is becoming successful and google is looking at us the way we are projecting ourselves. In your situation, it seems accidentally you have got traffic and ranks for not so relevant keywords, google will look at your website as an authority website for keywords related to this off-topic page (since other pages are not ranked). How to overcome this situation, you can find solution here : https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions As Rand Fishkin has rightly suggested, you would have to let go of off-topic page ranks along with doing the right steps to ranks right topics. I hope this helps. Regards, Vijay

Hi Bill, You are rightly worried about the change in category structure, the structure earlier looks better than new structure of category page URL (before it was website.com/product-category/product-sub-category will now be website.com/more generic category/product-category/new-subcategory/product-category ). The idea of right page URL structure should be to keep the length of URL in control and also give show the right directory structure to the search engines. It seems with the new structure you can get lengthy URLs and also repeat lot of keywords within the URL. Having said that, you should read these two articles for further help https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls https://moz.com/learn/seo/url I hope this helps, feel free to respond and ask further. Regards, Vijay

I haven't yet, and I'm hoping to solve the bigger issue first I suppose. Essentially, i built the content on www.domain.com, the canonical tag is correct. www.UnknownSubdomain.domain.com is what's showing up in rankings. The entire URL structure of the ranking domain makes no sense. We have no record of the subdomain being created, when i ping the random URL I get our host ip. I'm working on creating the property in search console and will try to block it from there.

Thanks for the response! I dont think thin content is an issue. These guys wrote a lot of good stuff for their website. I did check OSE and I see one site with a spam score of 7 that im sure isnt doing any good.

Thanks Sam!  This new client maintains his website on an in-house server.  As the relationship develops, we will encourage them to allow us to host the site for him, which will make things much easier. I've forwarded your email to my colleague - we'll see what can be done to correct the situation!  Thanks again for the fast response!

Hi there, Sam from Moz's Help Team here Chris is absolutely right - great suggestions. I've also put together a bunch of resources for you here, since you're just getting started on your Moz journey! First, we have an extensive guide to learning SEO! And this Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Guide to SEO is great to refer back to as you level up your skills and knowledge. We also have a Getting Started guide to walk you through setup and the tools. Moz Academy is awesome for when all that reading gets tiresome and you want some videos! You can watch a past Welcome Webinar for Moz Pro to show you all of the tools or arrange a live 1-on-1 demo with one of our fabulous onboarding specialists from this calendar. I hope this helps! If you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out here or at help@moz.com (response times are generally quicker there from our Help Team).

Thank you very much, I greatly appreciate the response. Any other feedback from is welcome. Thank you!

You're welcome, Brian, and I hope you'll be able to find a consultant who can offer a second opinion. Sounds like you are trying to save your client a big headache!

They are likely trying to help you out by getting OFN and Venturize into the meta description, as your default does not contain any of those terms.   If you feel those terms are more heavily associated with your brand, you might consider updating your description to reference and see if that fixes the behavior. Typically Google does this to help you out, and pulls from the content of the pages, and your footer is the only element referencing the OFN keywords. Cheers, Jake Bohall

I would use canonical tags in this situation.

That's it! No need to submit your sitemap to any other search engine.

Option 2 sounds like the logical option - I don't think a flat structure would make sense for what you have to work with. Interlink your content from other pages and don't try to be clever with structures here - it's whatever makes the most sense to what you are trying to do. Of course, it is ideal to try not to place any content too far down the tree but if you have no options in what you can and can't do with changing the structure itself, then I would work with what I have. -Andy