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Yes.. Same logic applies in this scenario.

Sorry Umar, I guess my question was, how do I grant credit to the original post?  I hear it has something to do with rel=canonnical (this post was first seen on domain.com) but i guess how would I reference that in techinical terms?

Hello JoAnne! Could you please send this to help@moz.com? We'll be able to help you a lot easier that way I took a look at your two listings and see that the addresses seem to be matching for both, so please let us know exactly which address you're looking to update as well. Thank you! Kevin Help Team

I have done a few bits in Magento before and found it relatively easy to develop further and include new elements, pages or blocks. At the end of the day Magento is a hugely customisable and very good e-commerce platform, so I don't think the system is the problem, it would sound like you are being held back by your developers. As per Franciso, I would suggest looking for a few new developers to help you with the system. If you are constantly trying to further optimise your site such as with a/b tests, better UX, UI, SEO and more then I would consider setting up an in-house team that can concentrate on it full time and that way you update as and when required not months down the line.

Hi Radi! It looks like you're a Pro member, so one thing I'd suggest is to run a Full SERP Report on the keywords you're concerned with using the Keyword Difficulty tool. It can give you a better sense of what's going on. Cyrus made a great video on the report here. I hope that helps!

Hi Mike, You're correct that the Product markup is really intended for individual items, not a category of items. Under "Multiple Entities on the Same Page" here https://developers.google.com/structured-data/policies Google suggests that you mark up each item on the page individually. Other than that, yeah, not much else to mark up. Hope that helps!

Since DA and PA are rather logarithmic, if there is a small difference in DA or PA between the sites then merging them will be a nice benefit.  If there is a big difference in DA and PA the merger will probably not make the stronger site more competitive. An important thing to look at is the number of links that these two sites share.  If they have very similar linking domains and linking pages then not much will be gained by the merger.  If they have diverse and very different linking domains and linking pages that is when the most will be gained, based upon link metrics only. Another important thing to consider is the traffic producing assets.  Does the site being redirected have unique, substantive, well-written and well-ranking articles.  If it has lots and they are supreme quality then it will be a good asset gain for the site that receives them. Finally, will the site being 301ed contribute new products, new keyword reach, improved rankings.  These are what might be improved on the weaker site if they are placed on the stronger site.  Also, will the merger give current shoppers a greater selection of products, greater selection usually means larger average shopping carts.

Yes – for now we have! Thanks, Christy.

As far as I know, our algorithm for keyword difficulty has not been changed in any serious way. However, we did just release a fresh link index update, and since the difficulty is calculated based on a number of different link metrics, the scores that you're seeing could conceivably be differing due to these link metrics having been recalculated. I'm honestly not sure what KC is, so I can't really speak to that, but perhaps someone else can swoop in and cover me on that one

Hello SEO32, I apologize for the delayed response. There are several good questions here. They're also complicated questions, which don't really always have a single "correct" answer. So much revolves around the specific situation, and without seeing your website it is difficult to say what is best for you. Also, much of what we think we know about this kind of stuff is either based on what Google tells us (which isn't always the truth) and what we've observed and deduced from our own experiences (which aren't always the same). True "testing" of this stuff one variable at a time isn't always possible so we rely on best practices and our own experience. That said, I will attempt to answer your questions with what I would probably do in most situations, including links to more information when possible. Do we implement self referencing canonical URL on the main page and each paginated page? Here's what Rand says, and he's probably seen way more data than I have: "Whatever you do, DO NOT: Put a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL. You'll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren't worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages). Add nofollow to the paginated links on the results pages. This tells the engines not to flow link juice/votes/authority down into the results pages that desperately need those votes to help them get indexed and pass value to the deeper pages. Create a conditional redirect so that when search engines request paginated results, they 301 redirect or meta refresh back to the top page of results." Keep in mind that post is from 2010, and I think before Google said a "View All" canonical <a>was their preference</a>. I have seen plenty of sites do well ranking the canonical category page, and with indexing most of the product pages, while all paginated pages had a rel canonical that referenced the first page in the series (i.e. .com/category/ or .com/categry1/category2/). It probably helps that they had good XML sitemaps for product pages, and plenty of internal linking, unique content on category pages, etc. I have also seen sites do well using rel next/prev without rel canonical, or rel next/prev with self-referencing canonicals on paginated category pages. I think where you run into problems is when you also allow the facet/filter/sort versions to have self-referencing rel canonical tags. Here is what I advise in most cases: Use rel next/prev (not because I think it works, but because Google says to and I don't think it hurts) along with self-referencing rel canonical tags, and "follow,noindex" robots meta tags on paginated pages. Always include a followable link to the first page in the series from every subsequent page. For example: <previous>first...1...25...26...27...last...</previous> I recommend always having a first and last page link. The first is obvious because it means pagerank is going to flow into it from every other page in the set, giving it the most internal links of all. The last is more of a crawlability and usability thing. For users it helps us figure out how much further we have to go. It does the same thing for search engines. Instead of blindly following a path that may or may not have an end, a message is sent that tells a spider how much further it has to go. I don't know if Google takes advantage of that signal or not, but it just makes sense to include it. If you want to get fancy you can try making the 'last' link flash or javascript or something so it doesn't pass (as much?) page rank. The category root pages usually have links from site-wide navigation, unlike the paginated versions, which further establishes it as the page that should be ranked highest. Make sure the first page in each series is indexable, and has content that does not appear on the paginated versions. Also, make sure that ?p=1 doesn't have a self-referencing canonical tag, but references the root page for that series (e.g. /category1/category2/). All subsequent variations (e.g. color, size) should rel canonical back to their root page. For example: /category1/category2/?page=2&size=s&color=blue would have the following URL in the rel canonical tag: /category1/category2/?page=2 Which happens to be followable, but not-indexable, and has a self-referencing rel canonical tag. In this way you give search engines a strong signal about which URL in the whole set is the strongest (i.e. /category1/category2/) because it is indexable, has its own content, has the most internal and external links, is the simplest version of this URL pattern, and is at the root of the directory. You're telling search engines which page is next in the series, and that this page is first in the series. You're telling search engines which page is last in the series, as well. Google usually does an awesome job figuring it out from there. There are always exceptions. Do we implement noindex/follow meta robots tag on each paginated page? I would. Consider this from Google's perspective, or from that of a searcher. Someone types "Blue Flower Dress" into Google. Is the best page to return a deep category page full of blue dresses, one of which happens to have flowers? Or would it be the Blue Flower Dress product page? I can't think of any reason why I would want to land on page 3, where what I'm looking for is listed among dozens of other things, when I could just go straight to the thing I'm looking for. Likewise, if someone searches for "Blue Dresses" is the best page /dresses/blue/?page=3 (paginated page in the Blue Dresses category), OR /dresses/blue/ (the very first page of the Blue Dresses category), which also has useful content about blue dresses? Long story short, when it comes to transactional eCommerce queries, they're usually either looking for a product page or the first page of a specific category or sub-category. Or sometimes the home page. Therefore, I don't see any reason for allowing paginated URLs to be indexable in most cases. Non-transactional eCommerce content is different (e.g. buying guides, comparison charts, reviews...) but I still wouldn't allow paginated pages to be indexed in most cases. Slightly Off Topic - Filters/Facets/Sorts Or perhaps the category is "casual dresses" and "blue" is specified in the "color" attribute. In this case, would the best page be /dresses/casual/?color=blue , /dresses/casual/ or /dresses/casual/?color=blue&page=4 for someone who Googled "blue dresses"? I've bolded the one I'd prefer as a searcher. Here again, as with the internal search results, there is an opportunity to use real data to inform your decision. Pay attention to the facet/filter/sort URLs most accessed by shoppers and consider turning those into category or collections pages with their own URL pattern (e.g. /dresses/casual/blue/). One example I come across all the time is when "Brand" is a filter instead of its own limb in the category structure. If people are shopping by brand, as they do with most consumer products, then you should have a brand subcategory under each major top-level category. If I search for Levi Jeans Google doesn't want to send me to a "pants" page where I have to set a filter to see only Levis. I should go to pants/brand/levi/ . If I Google Chefmate Pots I want to see cookware/pots/brands/chefmate so I don't have to set a filter after I get there. This doesn't mean all filter pages should be turned into category pages either. Use your best judgement based on the pages most of your users are accessing from the navigation and filters. Do we include the canonical URL for each paginated page in the sitemap if we do not add the meta robots tag? I would add the robots meta tag. Please let me know if I've misunderstood the question. We have a view all but will not be using it due to page load capabilities...what do we do with the view-all URL? Do we add meta robots to it? I would add a meta robots "index,nofollow" tag, and would also use the canonical page's URL (e.g. /category1/category2) in the rel canonical tag. For website search results pages containing pagination should we just put a noindex/follow meta robots tag on them? This is one of those situations involving crawl budget potentially being eaten up by an infinite amount of pages. I would consider blocking the internal search result URLs in the robots.txt file. They are of no use to Google, as they consider a search engine returning search results with links to more search results somewhere else a bad user experience. This is also what Google recommends in their Webmaster Guidelines: "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines." However, I would also make use of those pages internally. Rather than relying on a search result page for things people often look for, track what is being searched for and create static, indexable pages. For example, try "Collections" pages on eCommerce sites, as well as FAQ pages, or "Industries" or "Use Case"-type pages on lead generation sites. This is a much better user experience for someone arriving on that page from a search engine. We have separate mobile URL's that also contain pagination. Do we need to consider these pages as a separate pagination project? We already canonical all the mobile URL's to the main page of the desktop URL. I think you should if that's the way you're handling it. Here is a post I did on mobile best practices. It covers some other options. I would also add a rel=”alternate” tag in the HTML header of the desktop page, which alerts search engines to the corresponding mobile URL and helps define the relationship between the two pages. The bottom line for me is to always think about what would be the best experience for someone searching from Google for something, and to try and use all of the various technical options to ensure that is the page I'm telling Google they should rank for that query, or those types of queries.  The 'best practice' changes, depending on the situation. I hope others will join the discussion with their own experiences and findings.

Hi Christy, Thanks for taking the time to reply. Great feedback and recommendation to pursue building out each company website with it's own domain. Thank you!

Thanks to each of you for taking the time to respond with such a great mix of information and opinions. It is very helpful. Now to plow through all the data!

Thanks!

Thanks Miriam!

I'm glad you figured it out! Always happy to help, Mike.

Hey Charles, It's always better to get the links on the relevant pages. I usually follow this approach, Suppose you have a site Abc.com and you keywords are "android app development", "iPhone app development", "mobile app development companies". Now in this case, my preference would be to have different pages for "android app development" & "iPhone app development" and all the related links should come on these pages. But if I get the opportunity to play on generic keywords or ""mobile app development companies"" my preference would be the home page. The logic is simple, get the links on the best and relevant pages even if it's a blog page so your referral visitor can stay on your page. Even from the core SEO perspective, it's good to have links to the inner pages to boost their authority. Hope this helps! Umar