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This was example with GA. I believe that they use dwell time and next or subsequent searches for this. Because they can't fight against shopping cart abandonment's and other issues. So they have some as benchmark against other sites. If your metrics are above average in your industry then it's great. If your metrics are weak - you're in trouble. You can see benchmarking in Google Analytics. So whatever you do just try to make better metrics than them. Example - i just have seen that some of mine sites have pages/session 1.40 vs 2.99 in benchmark. Also mine session duration is 1:32 vs. 2:19 in benchmark. Similar metrics are in PPC too - you need to be above the average for better positions, prices and conversions. I know that all this explanation can sound little bit messy... but this is question all SEO specialists think about these days. If you know the answers you can become millionaire and retire quick.

At this point the interstitial "penalty" only affects mobile sites that show a full screen interstitial to readers. It's not really a penalty, but rather, what Google says is that it can cause a site to lose its "mobile friendly" label which could result in a reduction of rankings. What you are doing is pretty common and wouldn't result in a penalty. However, if it is really annoying to users and causes a lot of people to immediately click away and go back to the Google results then this could possibly negatively impact rankings. This would be a good case for A/B testing to see if you get significantly better user engagement when they don't see the popup. If so, then that's a sign that the popup is too intrusive.

My gut says that this is not a Panda hit. Any sites that I saw get hit with Panda in July were hit on exactly July 17th or 18th. The decision to noindex (I'm assuming you meant noindex rather than nofollow?) product pages is one that would likely need some in depth investigation made in order to decide. But, in most cases I do not recommend noindexing products. A drop from #1 to #3 does not sound typical of a Panda hit. That said, I have seen some Panda hit sites that start with a slight decline and continue to fall from there. But, again, my gut is saying this is not Panda. A drop from #1 to #3 could be a whole bunch of things and I'm guessing that having some thin product pages is not your main problem. This sounds like a question that is probably a little too detailed to be answered in Q&A. Perhaps if you are able to provide the url you can get some better feedback, but otherwise you'll mostly be getting gut instincts and opinions.

This is a touchy ethical question for SEOs. I think there are some questions you should ask yourself. First, are you sure the company in question placed the links? Is it possible that they were the victim of negative SEO that didn't work? Second, do you actually deserve to out rank them? Is your content truly better? Do people want your result more than theirs? If you can answer yes to both of these, then I think you can feel comfortable in moving forward with a spam complaint. If not, you risk either kicking someone while they are down, or hurting user experience overall - neither of which are particularly ethical.

Hi If you have an alert set up for your site and Google is sending you messages about your ndw product it simply means that Google  has found the page, which is a good thing. What is your concern? Ken

The SERP did link to the correct (canonical target) domain. If the canonical tag is on domain1.com/product-a, the SERP was correctly pointed at domain2.com/product-a. Because the page on Domain 1 is supposed to be de-indexed, I was expecting not to see the page at all. This is my first crack at cross domain canonicals. It's an interesting way for Google to handle it. BTW, from a rankings perspective, the cross domain canonicals were extremely productive. Domain #2 got some huge rankings increases. I've been tracking the results closely. I should publish the results when I get a chance. The most important result is that the keywords (+/-700) associated with the canonicals  improved by an average of 22 positions over the higher position prior to the canonicals being implemented. What I mean by that is for a keyword (ex: "widgets"), Domain 1 was Ranked 46, and Domain 2 was ranked 57, our average improvement was to position 24, which is 22 positions better than the higher ranked domain (in this case, Domain 1). Rankings improvements for keywords already on page 1 or Page 2 increased by an average of 2.5 positions over the better ranked domain. What was really cool was that when we canonicaled in the "wrong" direction, where the keyword ranked higher on the domain that was getting the canonical tag, the results were indistinguishable from the results where we canonicaled in the "correct" direction. So, in this case, if a keyword ranked higher on domain1.com, and we canonicaled to domain2.com, the average ranking increases (from the higher ranking position) were almost identical to using canonicals in the "correct" direction (from the lower ranking position). These are both ecommerce sites with DAs of +/-40. What was also interesting is that Google accepted the canonicals in cases where our product descriptions were markedly different.

Where this is  appearing the most is on cross domain canonicals. We have duplicate content across 2 websites, and we've canonicaled some pages from Site A to Site B, and some from Site B to Site A. In theory, pages that were canonicaled to the other domain should be deindexed. When I run a rankings report, I see pages for the wrong domain ranking, a month later. They are pages with parameters, or old URLs that we've changed. It's like a game of whack a mole. Every time we get a page deindexed, a duplicate with a different parameter takes its place. And this is in spite of calling out these parameters in GWT. What I imagine is happening is that we have several URLs for the same page indexed. When Google crawls our site, it is correctly canonicaling the page it crawls. In the rankings, however, Google is probably pulling a duplicate page out of its index, and ranking it without crawling it. If it was crawling it, Google would see the canonical tag, and not rank it. So we have an ongoing battle to get Google to crawl the page it just pulled out of its index to see the the canonical tag. The reason for all this is that when a page cross domain canonicals correctly, the rankings for the duplicate page on the other site goes up dramatically. As long as Google keeps ranking the wrong pages, we don't get the rankings bump on the other site.

Yes this should be doable, just follow the instructions here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory and note that there is some specific info for IIS in there.

Building on Patrick's answer using Robots.txt was the fastest way for things to take effect, but if implemented wrong can impact you pretty bad. In addition to adding the exclusions in the Robots.txt, I also put in a removal request to remove the pages with parameters from googles index using the Google Url Removal tool, this combined with the other options helped clean up my results in the google index. Hope this helps.

Fish frys = Link Bait (pun intended)

I have been experiencing this on my site as well. Just curious if you were still receiving this kind of traffic since it has been a few months? Recently there have been one or two times throughout the day where I see a huge spike in direct traffic. As you mentioned, the GA numbers seem to suffer but as long as this does not impact my rankings or site performance I'm not too worried. I too am concerned that this is more than just an annoyance and possibly reason for concern. I've had other sites show up on GA as sending tons of referral traffic and figured it was just spam, but not sure of the benefit to a spammer of sending ghost direct traffic unless it is some kind of negative SEO attack. Would love to find out.

I experienced a similar issue recently. Upon closer inspection I noticed there were duplicate canonical tags on the pages. Google actually ignores ALL if there are more than one. So I would certainly double check that.

The reason that duplicate content is an issue is because Google will eventually drop one of the duplicates from its index, and if you have both page A and page B canonicalized to page B, Google will eventually drop page A in favor of page B. If you are concerned that page A is not being crawled, you can use Fetch as Google to ask Google to recrawl it. But if A is not being crawled and B is, again B will be chosen over A in the results pages.

Hello. Depending on your CMS, shopping cart, or web site design software you can often find sites that are well-designed and ranking well, as one example: https://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/ecommerce/ (for Wordpress). you'll be able to find similar pages for Magento, Shopify, and others.  Cheers!

My first thought is that rewriting your product descriptions will not be as effective as getting user generated content, like product reviews, on your site. Even if you rewrite the content, it will still be the same context and it won't offer anything uniquely valuable to the searchers. You need uniquely valuable content, not just uniquely written content. My second though is that flattening the URLs is not the best way to do that. Your category and subcategory names should be structured to help you get as much information into your URL as possible. You don't want to stuff them with keywords, but you want them to be progressively descriptive. For example, Category = Women's Pants / Subcategory = Boot Cut Denim / Product Name = Riders by Lee Women's Dark Wash Boot Cut Jeans URL - www.mystore.com/womens-pants/bootcut-denim/riders-by-lee-womens-dark-wash-boot-cut-jeans.cfm as opposed to www.,mystore.com/riders-by-lee-womens-dark-wash-boot-cut-jeans.cfm The first example would be the best possible URL format. Taking out the categories would only reduce your ability to target keywords effectively.

Hi Ryan is correct, it can be done by looking at the server logs, it's a bit tricky to set up so just checked your devs have done this before. also and this is important do you want to show different data to organic visitors from Google or all Organic visitors from all search engines.

If the alternative is just de-indexing those duplicate pages on one website, then I'd definitely recommend the cross-domain canonicals, yes.

Thanks, Linda. What I'm looking for is a theoretical number.

IMHO, Google has essentially tied our sites together, looking at the rankings and other metrics. We've upgraded some product pages with the same result - the upgraded page and the old page on the other side are stuck on page 2. They even mirror each other in the SERPs. They both move up and down by similar numbers. If Page A drops 2 slots, page B drops 2 slots. It's like the pages are attached at the hip...

It's a big site, and the most important category page. It explains a lot.