Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Shawn,

I would use robots.txt to target "rogerbot" to not crawl the specific parameters you're concerned about.

Here are some links that might help you out:

• About Rogerbot's User Agent String-
• How to target specific bots
• How to target specific query URL's

Hope that answers your question! -- Andrew

Hey Fuel Interactive --

To answer your specific question, I would use the meta (noindex, follow) tag instead of the canonical. It doesn't pass authority, but it is the correct usage. It will strike the page from ranking consideration, and allow the overall course page to have less competition.

Another question for you: is the article listing page already ranking higher than the overall course page, or is this a worry? If it's a worry, I recommend testing it out first so you don't prematurely optimize. Just a thought.

Hope that helps -- Andrew

Hey Mark,

• Your old URL might drop in ranking b/c it lose an internal link; it depends on how many links (both internal/external) it currently has. If it has a lot, the loss of an internal link may not matter that much.
• The new URL should rise in ranking for green shoes. There's no guarantee it will rise to replace your old URL. It depends on its link profile, competition, and on-page SEO.

Here are some additional thoughts on strategy:

• If you can, maybe ADD the new link instead of REPLACING the old link. Then you won't lose the internal link.
• I'd test it out for a week by making the proposed changes. If you don't like the changes, revert the menu.

Hope that helps.

-- Andrew

Not to mention time-of-implementation. I agree, SEO is very much is a balancing act.

You could embellish the content (add to make it 300 words) to warrant its own page. Then the question is: is it worth my time?

Best of luck!

Hey Tim,

I agree with your strategy.

There should be little reason why the same content would change in ranking. If the text, the internal linking, the # of pages are the same, the url's... the spiders shouldn't be bothered much.

I also think changing a few pages at a time is the strategic thing to do.

--Andrew

Hey cjkimber,

That's actually a common dilemma. Many sites prefer to "meta no-index" your tag pages, to remove those tags from consideration in ranking. That way your primary page (and all others) will rank higher than the tags.

The easy way to do that is to download the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress. In the plugin, you can noindex the content by clicking:

SEO (sidebar) > Title & Metas (sidebar) > Taxonomies (tab) > Tags > {Select "noindex, follow"}

There are a lot of other tools that will help you out w/ other parts of your SEO in the plugin.

Does that answer your question?

-- Andrew

Hey Mark_Ch,

One more question--what's your plan with the old URL's? e.g. /green-shoes adn /sports-shoes?

Andrew

No problem, Wayne. Hope that helps.

Nope, but thanks! That was a hypothetical I created. I'm part of an in-house SEO team for an San Diego online printing service. If you have a spare "online printing" link, that's a different story...

Hey Wayne,

I prefer relevance over proximity much more.

When I think about keywords I want to rank for (e.g. a local dry cleaner), I think "dry cleaning" first (keyword relevance), "Los Angeles" next (local). I would rather Google know that I am a "dry cleaner" than "Los Angeles"; it pins your website higher up for the business type.

-- Andrew

My recommendation is that you give each article its own page and unique link. It may take some doing, but here's why you should:

• Having its own page gives each article a chance to rank
• The aggregate's page keeps changing, so its rankings will constantly be changing as its keyword makeup changes

Article feeds ought to be structured like Wordpress homepages:

• With

Like I said; it's not the 'easy' answer, but it conforms to best SEO practices.

Hope that helps! -- Andrew

Morning, BobGW,

It depends on the purpose of your question:

• If your question is: will these links help? Yes, they'll help if the links aren't spammy. They may even help you tap into new audiences, keywords, and referrals.
• If your question is: are these links worth your time/money? That depends on your parameters. If it's cheap for you to experiment, experiment. If it's NOT cheap for you to experiment, then it depends on your risk tolerance level. I'd recommend you go for it; you should try to explore the possibility of what those keywords do for your site.

Hope that answers your question!

--Andrew

Hey Mark_Ch,

For clarification:

• What do you mean when you say "main menu"? A horizontal navigation bar? Sidebar?
• What do you mean when you say "menu url" and "established page url"?

Let me know, so I can better understand and answer your question!

Thanks, Andrew

Hey henya,

It might depends on how the popup is implemented. You might not have to worry about the issue if the popup is completely done in Javascript.

If it's fully done in Javascript, the crawler won't see the content (because it doesn't exist yet; the JS creates it.)

-- Andrew

Hey rosswhistler,

There is a filter right above the table, where you can select "Show <all>". You can change <all>to <only follow="">.</only></all></all>

I like to keep a tab on all links (just so I know the scope of my reach), but you're right--I'd focus much harder on the follow links.

— Andrew

Hey Primocards,

There are a couple of factors here:

• The "on-page grade" you got was from Moz's crawler, and they're very specific about exact matches. On the other hand, Google's crawler tends to be more loose. Moz doesn't futz around w/ variations with punctuation, plurals, etc. And yet Google will know that "men's" and "mens" are fairly similar.
• I have noticed that Google does have different rankings for slightly different permutations, e.g. "printing company" vs "printing companies" can lead to a local (with local packs) versus a national search (no local packs)
• Then there's the grammar. I'd say that "men's" is the more accurate, and that may have a small (IMO, the effect is probably very small) impact

tl;dr; change it if you can, otherwise, don't worry about it. If you just want to improve the usability your Moz reports, just change the keyword you're grading from "men's" to "mens".

Hey Chris-

Just to clarify — you're asking about management tools for the "On-Page Optimization" section of Moz Analytics?

And you were suggested to track on-page optimization using the ranking tool?

-- Andrew

grats!

Hey Jay —

Where're you doing these crawl tests? Does Google Webmaster and Moz both show these errors?

Also, is there a remote chance something is wrong in the sitemap.xml?

— Andrew

Hey Moses —

If you wanted to send the ranking history report to another email address, you might want to try to create a "Custom Report" (top right hand corner when you're logged in).

In the last step of the Wizard (step titled "Schedule Report"), you can pick and choose various reports to go into a PDF, which is then emailed to you.

Hope that helps—Andrew

Hey Khi5 —

I just took a closer look at your webpage, as well as the related questions that you've asked before.

I think an even bigger problem than "duplicate content" is "thin content". The main body of your page is 56 words, when the general rule of thumb is to put 300+ words of content.

To answer you more specifically:

• No, I don't believe that search engines have the ability to identify very similar content, because they go by keyword. Even if the search engines DON'T categorize the content as duplicate, they're all competing with each other for the same keywords. The articles are all competing with each other in the same space. If you're trying to focus on "Honolulu" vs "Waikiki" vs <some other="" neighborhood="">, then your pages also need many more repeats of the keywords you're trying to win. </some>
• If the bulk of your page is unique (b/c you're writing about Honolulu as a category vs Waikiki as a specific neighborhood), then you don't have to worry about duplicate content; most of your content is unique

tl;dr: > 300 words, repeat desired exact match keywords several times on a page; yes, create create unique content to make the pages more unique and specific

Hope that helps more.