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Hi Matt, thanks for your reply! In the alias section of our ecommerce platform (Demandware) we have set this redirect: www.example.com --> HomeShow When HomeShow solves in the locale pipeline (www.example.com/en/home or /it/home etc). Is Demandware that automatically assigns the right home page based on this method: If it is the first time you land on Example and you don't have our cookie, Demandware will set the locale based on your browser language and the country from your IP (we use the country just for the shipping, so in this case we just consider the language). If it is not the first time you see Example.com Demandware will use your cookie stored, using the previous language you set. I.e.: you land for your first time on example.com, you come from Paris, the language was FR but you decided to change in DE for some reason. Then the next time you land on the website you will find DE as language and France as shipping country. HREFLANG We use hreflang tag in the code, it works perfectly so if you look for results in specific countries you will always find just the right pages (i.e.: if you look in Google.de all the results are www.example.de/women/etc, same thing for UK, IT, ES). The problem is just associated to the old home page, www.example.com. And all the sitelinks are correct, in the right language. This is the hreflang tag we have: WHY AN AUTOMATICALLY REDIRECT INSTEAD OF A LANGUAGE PAGE Because this is the logic we have adopted behind our ecommerce sites. We could potentially change this method to a splash page but the real problem is that in google.fr everything works perfectly!! It sounds absurd! In Google France we don't see www.example.com, we see the perfect snippet www.example.com/fr/home (if you write the exact query "example" (brand name), because if you look for hybrid keywords you will always find the right page in the right language). So the problem is just that if you type the query "example" you only see the 301 page www.exmple.com as the first result instead of www.example.com/LOCALE/home. I have found out that in Google Search Console, inside the internal link section, www.example.com is still in first position, with 37.000 links from different subdomains. I think that, as Rand Fishkin replied to my email, maybe Google feels free to decide what results display even if there is a redirect 301 that has been set for months. This is the reason why in France everything is ok, but in Italy or Spain is not. Matt, what do you think about this? Sorry for length of this post but I had to explain all the aspects. Thanks in advance! Davide

Canonicalizing http://sub.test.com to http://www.test.com will tell Google that those two individual pages are the same and it should only index http://www.test.com--it won't affect other pages on the subdomain. If you only have a few subdomain pages that are duplicates of root domain pages, you can just use canonicals to indicate which pages you want indexed. You won't need to noindex the duplicate ones--they will fall out of Google's index naturally once Google sees which are the preferred, canonical ones.

Hi there. There is the rule: do not show google duplicate content. So, having both, with and without the trailing slashes is an issue.  If you dont want or think is not necessary a redirect... you can set a canonical.  As you said, moz doesnt have a redirect, instead has a canonical. Check it out: view-source:https://moz.com/community/q/ Hope it helps. GR.

Thanks Jordan - it helped!

Hi, Yes, I have two different "thank you" pages, but I want to know how many users I loose on step 2 (sign in page A) without users who go to "sign in page B".

Hi there, In the past few weeks I found one major source of the 404 increase. Unfortunately for you this was an internal change from our webshop host in the way the self referring canonical got built up. It added an extra 'www.' to a specific group of URL's. We fixed this so now I'm marking those errors as resolved. Does anyone know how to show all of the errors in stead of the top 1000 list? Since we have 50k errors, this will take me 50 days to get to the last batch. @ViviCa1: another part of the extra 404 errors come from old product pages, just like you said. Maybe Google decided that not redirected URL's are still important so we get the chance to redirect them now? I'm setting up an internal workflow to start redirecting all non existing productpages from the past but also in the future to prevent huge lists of 404 errors in GWT. Marcel

Great! Thank you both! The "Search Analysis" is very helpful!

Hi Dominick! Good for you for being thorough about this. In answer to your 2 questions: As the business is genuinely being closed at this location and is not moving to a new location, you'll just want to follow Google's recommendations for reporting the business as closed: https://support.google.com/business/answer/6314541?hl=en&ref_topic=4854191 Yes, you should follow up with closing out as many other citations that pertained to the business as possible. Why? For a couple of reasons, including not wanting the other offices to have to field calls from unhappy customers who are seeking the closed business in vain, and also, because you never really want stray, inaccurate NAP floating around out there in the ecosystem for any business. So, yes, I vote for closing out the old references. Hope these replies help!

Yeap it's really rare. Even more rare that WMT doesn't scream any error. To check my mistake, i've run a screaming frog too. Sorry.

Thank you. I want to disallow specific URLs on the subdomain and add the shop sitemap in the robots.txt file. So I'll go ahead and create another!

I think Thomas is correct - Google will show whatever they think is the best user experience - IN THEIR OPINION. But in looking at the pages - there is something on that page that does not seems to be on the other - I'm attaching a screenshot - its the text phrase at the bottom of the page  - my norwegian is rusty ( ha ha ha) but it looks like that text block has the same brand names there that are in the meta description in serps - see attachment of image What I have been seeing for over a year now is when the meta description matches text on the page - then its more likely to show in the serps that way - but other than that I don't know of a way to "force" google to serve up your meta description in serps. 0ys80bendz81o780lfbi

Well if you would hide it from only Google that would be cloaking to a certain extend. But in this case I think you can easily get away with it as it will improve the user experience.

Thanks for your helpful feedback Gaston - much appreciated.

Hey Tom! How are you?! The canonicals on your example may have had a brief disappearance, however please look at the below exaple where the canonical was implemented but ignored, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:02443r6Ooc8J:www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/runner-end/runner-end-trouser-braces-wine-5611.html+&cd=84&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

The pages are loading now not sure what was causing that but Id keep an eye on it. Feel free to shoot me a message if you have any other questions. I don't mind helping out if I can.

When researching TTFB slowness for WORDPRESS I always start here: https://varvy.com/pagespeed/ttfb.html It's a great illustration on things you can control (beyond server) and I use it as a checklist ... I always seem to forget something simple.... like an edit in .htaccess.

I'm not aware of any research or detailed reviews, but it is safe to say that if other webmasters are utilizing the content from the firehouse and subsequently linking back to your site, there is an inherent benefit for SEO based on the link acquisition. Cheers, Jake

Hi there. If you google your query - http://bfy.tw/7rNu, you'll see there is quite a bit of advise on MOZ forum. Overall it comes down to expanding content for national arena, at the same time making sure that you do not remove much content, which makes website rank locally.