Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No problem! Great as always!

Okay that is what I figured. Thank you

Hi Joseph There is documentation in Shopify for SEO, but it's pretty basic. I was also able to find some plugins: Plug in SEO SEO Meta Manager Ultra SEO Simple SEO I would also check out this resource from Shopify - see if that helps a bit. Good luck!

wonderful thanks.

Well the keyword checker device is down, I could additionally endorse gear that you might want to find a tutor to test out: Open Site Explorer and their new Twitter tool FollowerWonk.

I agree with getting some experience with a couple of less important sites. I would also keep an "SEO log" that documents the things that you try, when you tried them, and how they worked. Paying close attention to analytics and rankings are really good things to do and you can track this stuff with moz tools.   This work is essential to understanding what works and what doesn't.

Sean It's not really necessary to use canonical url's. If you are sure that every piece of content on your site is available on a unique url you don't need to implement them. It doesn't hurt having them either. Using canonical url's (if implemented properly) can help to avoid duplicate content issues. Like Patrick mentioned, having canonicals doesn't imply that no duplicate content issues exist (I've seen sites where the canonical url is always equal to the url - which renders them completely useless) Crawl tools like Screaming Frog are the best option to check if you need canonicals, and if you have them, to check if they are properly implemented. rgds, Dirk

Hi all, Thanks for the responses & feedback. Alan, in this example, the fresh content would be relevant. Of course there are search queries that don't need freshness or updates, but I would argue most do need updates / freshness (even the ones we think we know the answer to over time). Once again, the conversation is not about RANKING for that page but about HELPING the domain achieve "freshness & relevance" around a topic with that duplicate content. Would love to see others chime in. Thanks, Cole

Thank you, it helps

I love it Kate Moriss. it make it simple with the small questions.

By giving me that link you indirectly answered my question so thanks! A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/. Having all my sitemaps in a /sitemaps/ folder meant that each of those sitemaps could only include URLs beginning with example.com/sitemaps/. I moved all my sub-sitemaps to my root (similar to how wordpress does it) so that they cover the scope of my entire site.

Hi John I would take a look at your backlink profile in Majestic and take note of your metrics there. I would also take a look at this resource to see if you need to remove links at all or if you have any issues after you research your backlinks. I would also check and see if any drops line up with algorithms or SERP updates. I would also check your Google Webmaster Tools to see if there were any issues that have popped up, like a potential manual action. Also, ask yourself about your partners backlinks: Does this link help my website? Is this link relevant to my website? Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it? Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website? If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy? If the link isn't relevant or doesn't help your site, it's better that you lose it. But if for some reason the site isn't sending traffic the way it used to, and it is a relevant partner, I would put their backlink profile through the ringer in Majestic and also check their metrics via SEMRush. Hope this helps! Best of luck!

Okay, but I would just like to follow guidelines, in case Google spots it

Hmm, so what it comes down to is that, you can index search pages but provided they have a purpose or add value to the end user. For instance, A user would search by category whereas an individual product search result isn't necessary when a product page exists. Thanks Dirk for the links, helps a lot Cyto

What the problem is with your site I cant say because we don't have the url. But having said that, Why block pages? I find it is very rare that you need to block pages, I remember reading that Google sees blocked resources as a spam signal, that by itself is not a problem but when mixed with other signals can be harmful. so do you really need to block the pages? if you really do, then use meta  noindex, follow. you want the links to be followed so that link juice flows back out of the links to indexed pages. or you will be pouring link juice away via any links pointing to noindex pages