Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You sir are a genius.  Thank you very much. Also mad props to the MozBar for picking up on this. Some observations... We've had these noindex tags on there for almost a year and just now Google found them or decided to honor them. We had a recent situation where Google was basically probing our website with fake URLs to see if anything turned up.  Source? incorrectly parsed URLs from JavaScript on houzz.com.  I think they are making some big changes on how they crawl JavaScript recently. One of these "problem" pages has some links pointing at it with a query string.  Nothing changes on the site because of these.  Google indexed the page with a query string despite the noindex.  Weird.  I guess Google does not always honor the noindex directive. One of these "problem" pages would come up when looking up the cached version in Google but could not be found in the index.  Odd again. Lesson to me is don't count on the meta robots tag for two reasons ... Google inconsistently implements it It's dangerous as a little bad code can take your whole site out of the index.

Thanks. Yes, I totally agree. That's the goal. We're just aggressive. Hopefully not too aggressive.

Hi, Can you just confirm the language. Search query - do you mean Google Webmaster tools/search console Search analytics - are you using Google analytics? I would expect most of the keywords data in GA to be missing due to not provided. Can you give me some more details? Craig

There will be a million and one reason why this might be, but I always start with any e-commerce site by looking at the content. For this example, I looked at the following page: http://www.grandcrayon.ca/hlr26411-hilroy-coil-scrapbook-26411.html There isn't a lot of content on there, but if you look at the description "Studio scrapbook features durable manila paper pages and oversized coil binding for easy viewing without tearing." in Google, there are another 23 sites using this as well. Another example page has this description "Jumbo straight straws are designed for use with cups that hold up to 32 oz. Straws are translucent and individually wrapped to keep them sanitary." and in Google, this shows another 19 sites using it. So, as a first take away, look at writing some unique content, although I appreciate this could be a big job. Looking at your site in Open Site Explorer, you are lacking on some good links, so I would be looking to expand on this as well. If you don't have much in terms of site power, internal pages will suffer. As I was on your site, I noticed it is quite slow, and after testing this, it isn't great (although I have seen a lot worse). Google doesn't like slow sites and it is bad for usability too. When testing in Page Speed Insights, it does give you some suggestions. Do your internal pages not feature in Google anywhere? -Andy

In short - do not concern yourself about negative SEO.  Yes it can happen - but if you monitor your site the way you are - ie using moz diagnostics to regularly crawl back links etc. you will identify spam links and then can go through the procedure to disallow.  So you have that covered. However you should appreciate that if someone creates a link for you, an editorial article - generally you want a follow link.  I spend time for clients trying to turn no-follows into follows. Then you get the link juice and the bump hopefully in rankings. Clear as mud? If not let me know. Good question your on the right track.

No problem at all -Andy

Hi Kay, I saw the screenshot and yes, I would recommend making space in your page design so that you can have a unique H1 (main heading/the most important headline) properly created for each of your pages. The H1 not only helps the search engines figure out what a page is about, but how a page is structured as well. The same goes for screen readers. This is why it is still best practice to make the H1 the main headline of the page, vs. a navigational element (with one unique H1 per page). While the importance of using a keyword-rich H1 has declined over the years as a page ranking factor, it still carries some weight. That said, when writing H1s (and title tags), it's always wise to consider what will be most helpful for the user. (And that is often if not always the same thing that is helpful for the search engines!) I agree with Andy that on an ecommerce site, if the heading for the page is a product name/type (or contains the product name/type), then this usually makes a good H1. I also agree that you should place it in the main body of the of the page, not the navigation. (Usually the tag is placed right after the opening tag.) I partly disagree with him that this shouldn't be a copy of a the title tag. I've found that using the same copy for the title and H1 tags (for the same corresponding page) is good for the user experience, and can reduce pogo sticking. So when the user clicks on a title in the SERPs through to a page with the same heading, it is obvious they found the right page. They clicked on the search result they thought looked good, and this page is obviously about the same thing... this is the page they want. Does that make sense? If using the product name/type for the H1, though, will not give you a compelling title tag (or a super short one), I would recommend sticking with the product name/type for the H1, and incorporating the same copy into the title tag (i.e., adding on to it, which could be as simple as adding your brand name). I hope this helps! Christy

Hi Charles, Not really, if you make sure that all the pages from site A make their way to either B or C then it won't have a very negative impact on traffic. The most relevant one and the one that's most important. According to the fact that you have more products on B I'd go with that one.

That's something you'd want to test with your users.  Generally though, the easier it is to get from Point A to Point B to Sale the better.

Hi Jag! Thanks for the links. Here's what I see: Moz Check Listing is surfacing the filled out page as the main Google+ Local listing (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MasterKhechensMartialArtsAcademyWilliamsville/about) and the less filled out page (https://plus.google.com/116492650865307526395/about?hl=en-US) as a duplicate. So, this tool is being shown the better page as main by Google. Going to Google and searching for 'Master Khechen’s Martial Arts Academy Williamsville' I am being shown the better page - not the less-filled out page in the 3-pack: https://www.google.com/search?q=Master+Khechen’s+Martial+Arts+Academy&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=Master+Khechen’s+Martial+Arts+Academy+Williamsville So for this branded/city search, I am seeing what I believe is your desired page - not the thinner duplicate. Searching Google for 'martial arts williamsville ny' the business isn't coming up in the 5-pack, but clicking on the maps results from there, they are coming up further down in the map pack. Clicking the 'be the first to review' link on that result, I am being taken to the thinner, duplicate Google+ Local page. So, that's a problem. Less users are likely to go through all these steps, but it is indicative of the problem and confusion in Google's system being caused by the duplicate listing. Fortunately, the duplicate is unclaimed, which minimizes the potential for penalties resulting from it, but it's still not good that it exists. So 2 questions here: Are both pages showing up in the client's Google My Business dash or is only the good one showing up there at this point? Have you tried contacting Google again (https://support.google.com/business/#topic=4540083&contact=1)? Show them the above data to explain how the duplicate is still appearing.

Anders, Thanks for the reply. I definitely agree a self referring canonical might just be a good extra addition on these product pages, so I'm definitely adding that to our list of to do's if it does not improve. In terms of indexing pages - We have not restricted crawl frequency, we have it set to "allow google to determine the optimal crawl rate".  No other warnings found within the search console either. Thanks for your help.

Thanks. I'll look into it. We're a journalism operation so we're going to write the stories we need to tell rather than just following the search opportunities. BUT, once we've started to write the stories, I'd just like to provide the writer with information/suggestions that might help their stories do better in search.  And, a lot of what we write about is very, very timely so we'd need to be pulling from almost realtime data.

Thanks for answering, Cyrus! Will Open Site Explorer treat URL B as a new linking root domain and will it influence my DA? Just curious. Kind regards!

There are likely enough signals to consider the link similar to an internal link which has similar numbers, meaning: even though they're technically on separate domains, your ownership and relationship of both domains make links between the two more like internal than external links.  So doing nothing is definitely an option, but doing something that enhances user experience should be the guiding force if you do change.  Cheers!

SEOBandits... one thing is what examples Google presents and another the reality. The hreflang annotations can be used in every international or multilingual SEO option: ccTlds; Subdomains; Subfolders Regarding your fear re: Duplicated Content, the hreflang annotations substantially help avoiding this issue, because you are telling Google that those contents may look substantially or entirely identical to it, but they are meant for different users in different geo-location, hence they are not to be considered as duplicates.

Hi there, thanks for your question! To answer your question directly, Moz would be crawling your old URLs because it is able to find them using internal links and/or your sitemap. You can verify that Moz is crawling your old URLs --  and even see where they are finding them -- using Moz Analytics. To do this, log into into your Moz Analytics dashboard and go to the Crawl Diagnostics report, located under Search in the LH nav. The Crawl Diagnostics report will list the URLs of pages Moz has identified as duplicate content on the High Priorities tab, and how many internal and external links each of those pages has. To see the URL Moz crawled to find a specific page listed here,  download the CSV file from this tab and look at the column labeled "Referrer". Please let me know if this answers your question or not, thanks! Christy

Thank Brabants, So I think i sorted it. 1 changed the nameserver, 2 Changed the wordpress general settings to the new domain.. and all works great..phew Thanks Guys MOZ Community Rocks