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Hi There, Thanks for writing us and unfortunately this may be a question best suited by emailing our support staff at help@moz.com. In the email if you can provide us with your competitors sit information and where you are seeing the results in OSE we should be able to take a look. Hopefully with our powers combined we should be able to determine a resolution so if you have any questions for me in the meantime let me know. I wish you a spectacular day and look forward to speaking with you soon!

That must be really frustrating for you Mike. I am not surprised you can't access them at the back-end as these are almost always a by-product of the e-commerce system. So many don't care about what extra churn the sites produce. You could always robots out those bad pages? Just something like: Disallow: /store/pc/www.ocelco.com/* This should still readily allow everything else to be indexed after http://www.ocelco.com/store/pc/... Give it a try and then run the site through Screaming Frog and see if these bad pages are then picked up. -Andy

Hey Kevin! Back in 2012 when Google stopped supporting Geo Sitemaps, they made a point of explaining that they were still supporting KML files. See: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/28/google-still-supporting-kml-files-but-not-the-use-of-geo-sitemaps/ and https://developers.google.com/maps/support/kmlmaps However, as Patrick mentions, Schema has become much more the markup of choice in the past few years.

Andrew, Your canonical needs to exist - so for the page you mentioned you need to update the url to the one with the trailing slash. In fact - for all pages on your site you should check if the canonical exist (Screaming Frog can do miracles here) The issue with the https is a bit different - you should not have both versions (http/https in parallel) - so if your https certificate is ok you should put your site in https & redirect the http version to https This can be done by adding these lines to your htaccess: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} If you switch to https - you must make sure that all the resources you call on a page are also on HTTPS - if not, users could get a security warning. There is an article on how to migrate site to HTTPS on Yoast: https://yoast.com/move-website-https-ssl/ If your site is on https - your canonicals need to be in https as well. A tool like Screaming Frog can help you to check that both (https & canonicals are ok) - it's not free - but certainly worth the investment. Hope this helps - don't hesitate to ask if it's not clear Dirk

Hi Patrick I thought that but just wanted to triple check before writing a nice list for my developers tomorrow. Thanks Andy

As a followup to the above, do you have any thoughts on exactly how significant a factor server location is today? I know https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#2 says that it is not a "definitive signal." However, I'm at a point where IT needs to be convinced a CDN would be worth the investment, so I'm looking for a way to quantify the SEO impact of the server being hosted outside the country of your target audience - which I haven't been able to do yet. Has anyone seen any case studies/quantifiable info about this online? I know it's difficult to put numbers to a single ranking factor's impact. Additionally, for geotargeting in the Search Console, today over 60% of the .com traffic is from English speakers in the U.S. We use hreflang tags, but even so, a little over 30% of the traffic is non-U.S., so I would expect geotargeting our subdirectory for the U.S. audience specifically could have a negative impact on the non-U.S. traffic. Thoughts?

Oh - weird. I thought the first comments were from a Dmitrii, but now I see you share the same company Interesting topic thread for sure!

Hi Michael What that means, according to YourDictionary, "The inability of a DNS server to convert a domain name to an IP address in a TCP/IP network. A DNS failure may occur within a company's private network or within the Internet." You should check out TechRepublic's 10 tips for troubleshooting DNS problems and see if any of those can help you. Hope this helps!

I completely agree with Patrick. I can't reiterate enough, before you start blocking traffic make sure you do your research. For example semalt, a well known "spider" seems to send fake visits. Before you actually block anything, it might be worth just filtering analytics to get a true analytics of traffic. I try and view blocking/disavow as a last ditch effort. They will have the most drastic impact. Patrick included some great links, I highly suggest checking them out.

Hi Celine, Google is very smart at finding content these days, so I would avoid any possible ways of trying to hide it, but looking at what is there, I wouldn't worry too much. When looking at the model choice at the bottom of the page, it is the same for a reason, and there is no way around it. However, I wouldn't think that Google would see that as duplicate content. Lists in this manner don't normally cause issues and as mentioned above, it is more often larger 'chunks' of content that causes issues. There are other considerations that you might want to think about before releasing a lot more pages in this manner, and one if them is making sure Google won't see the pages appearing for no other reason that to draw in search traffic for particular phrases. Keep the pages well stocked with unique relevant content and you should be good to go. -Andy

thanks a lot.

Thanks, going to watch it for the second time About the cannibalization of the main keyword, yes we are going to lower the amount of our main keyword. BUT if Moz their primary keyword would be "SEO", then all other pages on their website - and I bet that atleast 95% of their pages contain the keyword "SEO" - would rank lower or the homepage would rank lower. But this isn't the case, it makes it stronger because your whole site talks about this topic / keyword.

At the risk of sounding too repetitive, I'd advise against this: And that's what I'm looking for: a few good articles mkt sites (3-4) to put some good articles on. That's what the client can afford now and I'm sure it is better then nothing. If you find a site that will allow just anybody to post to it and link out to their clients then it's either not going to pass much link equity or be a site that is on Google's radar as a low quality site that links out for SEO purposes. Now, I do believe that it is possible to strategically connect with the owners of quality websites and find ways to either provide content for them or offer them something of value on your clients' website that will make them want to link to them.  But, this is not something you can do at scale.  And you have to be really careful. What I do for the majority of my day is deal with websites that have been either penalized or algorithmically demoted because of link schemes gone bad. I can very easily spot a link scheme vs earned links. If I can spot these, then I'm sure Google can. If you're looking for a list of great sites that will allow you to post articles freely and add value to your clients, they likely don't exist IMO.

Thanks Dirk!

I can't see this causing you problems.  I've commonly noindexed huge numbers of pages, mostly for sites with Panda issues, and in several cases we've seen great increases in traffic with a future Panda refresh.

Hi, Yes & No . I'm quoting Google on this read it carefully you will get the whole idea about 404. Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site’s ranking? A: 404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a “soft 404”). Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response code of a URL, it has to be able to crawl that URL—if the URL is blocked by your robots.txt file we won’t be able to crawl it and see its response code. The fact that some URLs on your site no longer exist / return 404s does not affect how your site’s other URLs (the ones that return 200 (Successful)) perform in our search results. Q: So 404s don’t hurt my website at all? A: If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results. However, there may be other reasons that you’d want to address certain types of 404s. For example, if some of the pages that 404 are pages you actually care about, you should look into why we’re seeing 404s when we crawl them! If you see a misspelling of a legitimate URL (www.example.com/awsome instead of www.example.com/awesome), it’s likely that someone intended to link to you and simply made a typo. Instead of returning a 404, you could 301 redirect the misspelled URL to the correct URL and capture the intended traffic from that link. You can also make sure that, when users do land on a 404 page on your site, you help them find what they were looking for rather than just saying “404 Not found." Hope that helps. Thanks