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It's important to remember that Google in general takes canonical tags as more of a suggestion than a rule; they may decide that another page deserves to rank instead. Take a look at the version of the page that ranks: does it have more external or internal links pointing to it? You may be able to build up your canonical page by directing some additional link juice that way. If it's all the same to you which version ranks, it might be easier to just take the hint and make the ranking page the canonical page; otherwise, it may take some time to build up those off-page signals to get that version to rank.

Yeah, personally, ReSEOlve, I'd say to search Google and see what it chose, then stick with that. Unless, as Bryan notes, it makes a branding difference to you. But definitely make sure that you get the proper redirects in place once you've chosen one.

Uhmm.. Are you suggesting that SEO comes down to "just a matter of mentioning it in a blog post"? Man, we are all in the wrong business Of course not! To rank for another country, you need to do every single step of SEO process with a focus on that country. If you are talking about making the same domain rank for several countries, then you gotta do all SEO steps + a ton of technical work to make sure that all your content is not duplicate and targeted. Please, read this: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo

Hi guys, Thank you so much for your responses. That makes perfect sense. I've forwarded your answers on to our developer. Thanks again, Danny

Hi Heather - I think I understand what you're asking, and if I do you are asking about a way to flag certain links that you find while reverse engineering other websites as "potential links" that you could reach out to in some way to gain a link? To my knowledge Moz tools do not offer a "Flag for Prospecting" option that saves a URL so you can come back to it later as a potential link lead.  Our outreach team (link builders) use Google Docs to keep spreadsheets of links that we either attempted to build, or that we found that we should build, or obvious links that we didn't have, and then we color code those spreadsheets based on what our success was with that link.  Red being an outright failure - such as a paid link that we disregarded once we found out they wanted to be paid - or maybe Yellow being a link that we reached out to and it might go up some day but we hadn't heard back and don't want to spend too much time chasing if it's a lost cause. What you're talking about (I think) would require you to be able to flag links across multiple researched sites, and I just don't know of a tool that has a "mark for later" type setting in the link analysis.

@Dirk This tool is broken now - are there any good alternatives?

You could just redirrect all HTTP links to HTTPS using a .htaccess document https://www.captiga.com/linux/redirect-http-to-https/

Thanks Chris Ashton for your response. Yes, I agree with you on the benefit bit. I dont think there is any sort of impact apart from confusing the users.

As for an SEO checklist, I'd suggest the Web Developer's Cheat Sheet. It's a good idea to read the Beginner's Guide to SEO, too.

Hi Shauna! I agree with everyone here, and I'd encourage you to specifically not focus on the practices you've mentioned.  I'd also like to suggest two specific resources for you—Cyrus Shepard's "How to Rank" post and ebook, and our Beginner's Guide to Link Building.

Hi, I always tell the clients, "play with Google's toys" she likes that! It's beneficial as time goes on and these become more and more valuable. I don't believe that less is more applies with Schema, it's growing and becoming more and more valuable to ease the index-ability, build relevance and to stand out above your competition. So, yes add breadcrumb schema, would be my opinion.

HI, It doesn't redirect the user, no. It tells Google 'which URL' you prefer to be indexed. Now, again I don't believe that this is the best option, as you want BOTH cities to rank.  Does it affect the rankings? Yes, because you are saying Page A is more valuable than the duplicated Page B- leaving Page B out in the wild as the less important page for ranking. So, again having two versions of the domains ( based on the cities) isn't beneficial, these should both be under one domain ( wp installation) and adding a "locations" page, to reduce the self competition.

Google uses Google Plus to confirm contact information and to find recent posts. While you may not get traffic and engagement directly from Google Plus. It will help with SEO and rankings. Its something you may not benefit a whole lot from, but it would hurt to not have it.

I'll add this article by Rand that I came across too. I'm busy testing the solution presented in it: https://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo In summary, 404 all dead pages with a good custom 404 page so as to not waste crawl bandwidth. Then selectively 301 those dead pages that have accrued some good link value. Thanks Donna/Tammy for pointing me in this direction..

You should 302 redirect non-authenticated users to http://twiends.com/login. This is a better user experience, and you avoid the potential authentication issues with the 301. It's also not really correct or useful to make it a 301 redirect: users aren't being 'permanently' redirected to the login page, and there's not much utility in forcing link juice to be passed from /settings to /login either. So requests to /settings should either show that user's settings or 302 redirect to /login. Don't duplicate the home page content and rely on a canonical tag. Your domain (and domain authority) are still going to benefit, and I just don't think there's enough of a case to sculpt the flow of link juice in this way. As Andreas has pointed out, the link juice isn't the most important consideration here; it's better to focus on user experience. Your homepage's ability to rank for any given term is unlikely to be affected by the decision to 'rel=canonical' all private pages to the home page.

Thankyou for your answers  so It doesn't matter how many 301 you have in a website as long as it isn't a chain more than 3? Regards

Sounds like he is using a free version of WIX hence the letters and numbers, if he paid the subscription fee and hosting he can pick a unique domain name with no letters/numbers

There is some level of SEO value to be had from these but as the other comments have touched on, they're not necessarily the best ways to go about it. Done correctly, each of these methods are perfectly fine, just make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. For example, don't just start dumping links all over Reddit and play the numbers game. You risk getting banned but more importantly, the best you can hope for is a negative association with your brand name. On the other hand, if you have a resource that is very relevant to a particular topic then by all means, link to it. As an example, if you find a thread looking for specific data on a topic and you happen to have a (quality!) infographic that addresses the query perfectly, you're going to genuinely help answer the question and this is the key factor. Also, each of these should be used sparingly. If 80% of your link profile consists of Stumbleupon links, you're not going to gain all that much strength.

Hi Shauni! I agree with everyone here. There's nothing inherently spammy about having a lot of links, but if those links ARE spammy, then Google should catch on eventually. You might consider running a competitive link audit to see if you can take advantage of any on your competitor's links. There's a quick video on the practice here.