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Sure, thank you very much!

Usually, the reason is because category pages tend to be light on content and thus, not as indexable. And sometimes category pages are noindex due to this. Google is likely looking at your product page and finding it more relevant, based on content, than the category page for people who are looking for "sleeping bags."

Hi, I don't personally have any case studies of sites experiencing a drop in organic traffic on mobile which can be traced to a pop-up interstitial (maybe in part because my clients don't tend to use pop-ups in that way). When it comes to user-triggered content, I think it depends on a couple things, including how the user arrives at the pop-up and how the pop-up is implemented technically. Google's view of a site's mobile-friendliness is based on the result of a crawl, and so for instance if it's an event that isn't possible to trigger as a crawler, it shouldn't be a problem. I see it being similar to the use of JS navigation for country selection - it becomes an issue when (for instance) Googlebot can't get past a JS popup or drop-down because it can't click on a link to select a country option or to close the window. This type of situation is often the case for the sorts of popup that occur when the page loads, giving an annoying user experience, rather than because a user has chosen to click on a link to provide an email address (for example). Google have also made clear that the primary concern is around it being a poor user experience, rather than a technical issue. So I would see it as: Interstitial ad or other pop-up that appears on page load = bad. Some sort of non-disruptive data entry box like an email form that only appears when a user chooses to open it and which can be bypassed by a crawler = ok. However! That's just my theory, I don't have data at the moment to prove or disprove that hypothesis. I would love to hear from other people who have other theories or any practical examples of this. Also, if you're not sure how Google perceives a given page, run it through the Mobile-friendly testing tool and they'll tell you.

Hi Thomas, Thanks for the response. Would you know how search engines regard modules which may be the same for 3 or 4 articles. How would it know how the keywords in a module should be associated with any particular article, in terms of ranking a page? Thanks Ian

Hi Taiger! Just checking, did you and Daniel get this worked out?

So it sounds as though you have: A ".in" site for users in India, and A ".com" site for users outside of India. And that almost all of their content is the same. For this, you need to implement hreflang tags. You can read the Moz guide on hreflang tags here. For each on the ".in" site, find the similar page on the ".com" site, and then add hreflang tags to both. As an example, if I had the following two pages: www.mysite.in/example.html www.mysite.com/example.html These two pages have the same content and are both in English. I would add the following hreflang tags to both of them: Notice that the second link there has only a language code - not a country code. The ".com" domain is targeted at users speaking English, whereas the ".in" domain targets English-speakers in India. If you need to add more languages, you should try generating some hreflang tags with Aleyda Solis's hreflang tag generator tool. Finally,  if you want to check that you have implemented hreflang correctly, Distilled has released a tool at hreflang.ninja. If you implement hreflang correctly, Google search results in India will begin to show the ".in" domain. You can then remove the 302 redirect.

Thanks that's what I'm leaning towards at the moment.  Is there ever a case where you wouldn't use a noindex on subsequent pages for an ecommerce website that lists a large amount of products paginated?

Google ignores anything after the ? when it comes to indexing so you should be fine with your testing.

Hi There, Good topic, and like Chris, I agree that this approach of creating a single, really strong piece of content and linking from it to your city landing pages is a MUCH better idea than trying to re-hash the same topic over and over again for every city. I'm not an expert on how this would the flow of link influence, but I think it's way more important to consider the better usability your suggested method provides than would the thin/duplicate/spun content approach. Hopefully you can find other geo-specific topics to cover for individual cities, but if a single topic applies equally to all of your locations, then it's a good idea to present it that way.

Excellent, thanks Chris

This is a great discussion and I appreciate the dialogue and awesome answers here. I'm performing a backlink profile and developing a 301 redirect strategy for a website that has a forthcoming relaunch. I've found success using multiple platforms, including the magnificent MOZ. And I agree with Erica, not every platform, including Google, crawls the entire web. I use multiple platforms. For example, in Google Search Console the website I'm working on shows 10,000+ backlinks. Most of them are the main domain (e.g. website.com). But, a backlink profile ran in ahrefs.com shows around 5,000+ backlinks. What I've discovered in ahrefs is that the website has thousands of backlinks linking to other pages on the website (website.com/page-one, website.com/page-two, etc). This is really helping with my 301 redirect strategy and will help retain link equity when the new website launches. So, yes! Use multiple platforms to discover your website's backlinking profile and choose your battles from there. I recommend: MOZ, of course ahrefs.com SEMrush.com Majestic.com Google Search Console Happy backlinking to you all and good luck Jared!

This is exactly the solution I've been after. Your input and walk-thru is much appreciated!

It's not so much that this is going to hurt you but it also won't really help. You're far better off putting the effort into creating genuinely helpful content for each one. It's time-consuming but you only get out what you put in! You're not going to get a manual penalty for this sort of thing but it isn't exactly a great quality signal to have most pages on your site showing the same content over and over.

Hahaha, yeah, not my personal choice of reading material, either.

Very good question. Yesterday, I was discussing the same concept with my seniors. For Search engines it always give preferences as per my knowledge & experience like .tv domain for Live TV industry .media & .news for  Media industry I saw that websites with these domains get some more advantage or preference in ranking, yes for ranking all SEO techniques need to be follow. & If we talk from the common people perspective they are familiar with .com, .co.uk, .es or .net domains. sites with TLD are more able to connect with users. but I will always try first to take .com, .in, .net, .co.uk type domains. Here are some expectations too like if name & domain is same as your company name Go for it like Company name is Visually & website url - visual.ly

Hi Patrick, It's true, you will be somewhat limited by that, but with the exception of citation building, you should still be able to make a good effort at content development, linkbuilding, etc. Sounds like you're working with a really neat, diverse company that could become the answer to so many local homeowner needs if the brand becomes locally famous. Wishing you good luck

Can you share actual instances? Feel free to PM me those. I need to look at the actual setup. The above looks okay, but there might be something else going on. Also, remember that a canonical is a suggestion. If the SEs deem the page valid enough, different enough, or just plain don't know what to do with them yet, they can still index them. Let me know the real URLs and I'll take a look.

The only TLDs that get any known different treatment is the ccTLD (which sends a geolocation signal). The reason non-"standard" TLDs don't show up very often is that most people buy the common TLDs. Most people still associate the ".com" with websites because they are the oldest TLD. I personally own a ".info" for my email (not a new TLD either) and I typically have to spell it out to people (I occasionally get some strange looks handing it out verbally). I can only imagine the looks if I had a more exotic TLD ("Yes, my email is ralph@crazy.ninja... no that's really it"). So other TLDs are basically less popular and less well understood, which explains why they aren't used very often. The arguments over the years that I've seen that Google is flat out lying about the TLDs being treated equally have never really withstood scrutiny. There has never been anyone who has made a given TLD rank higher solely because of the TLD. The cases I've seen had other factors that could just as easily explain a ranking difference. And an objective test would be very difficult to create, as you would need two identical sites, and from an SEO perspective that's super hard to pull off. Ultimately, tho, why would Google lie about this? What's there to be gained in telling people it's not a ranking factor when it is?

Thank you so so much both of you it's saved me a massive headache. I had to close the script twice as there were two instances where the script tags were open and not shown. Ran the site through screaming frog and the Titles/Metas are showing up again. II have voted both of you up