Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Sohail,

Unlike Moosa, I have not seen a client lose positions just by having their IP changed - perhaps if this were location related traffic and you were based in London but the IP showed China I might see it happening, but it all depends on what is being implemented.

That said, I also think you should find out a little more about how this works. If someone requests your site www.sitename.com and that then forwards you through an unknown route until it reaches the destination server, then this additional hop might seem unnatural.

Is your site particularly slow? If you are based on Wordpress, then you can use Cache plugins to help speed things up. Even if you are not on Wordpress, you can help matters by employing some browser caching in your .htaccess file. Have you run your site through the Google Page Speed Insights to see what your score is? What recommendations does Google come back with?

-Andy

Personally, I optimise for Google and do very well in Bing and Yahoo without having to try. There are subtle differences but at the end of the day, they all want the same thing.

The same for all of my customers - there is such a small amount of traffic that comes from them, that I am not going to potentially ruin Google rankings in order to get slightly better ranking in the other two.

Andy

Hi,

I would certainly not be wanting to see duplicate answers to the same questions, so depending on how your Q&A will work, I would be looking to give one answer, unless there is a significant difference.

It's a little difficult to understand how your Q&A is presented and how answers are given, so would be happy to take a quick look if you post a link here or PM it to me?

-Andy

Hi Chris,

I am in agreement that taking the route of canonical would not be as beneficial as 301. Remember that a canonical is just a suggestion to Google and they can still opt to ignore this if they wish.

I would avoid any possible complications here and 301. It is understood that a rel=canonical passes page rank in the same way that a 301 does, with a minor loss, but as far as I am aware, there is no actual testing to show which passes more / less.

-Andy

I am always cautions about adding microsites for SEO benefits as these can come back and bite you hard when you least expect it.

Personally, I tend to steer clear of doing this and would opt to keep adding content to your existing site. It doesn't all have to be on the same page, but link out to a few niche articles you could write.

Keep it straight forward and you will have no problems

Regards,

Andy

Hi,

Open up search console (as long as you have it setup) and check to see if there are any warnings from Google.

It might be something very straight forward, but I would start here.

I would then read the MOZ guide on how they score these - you might pick up some ideas as to what can be causing this.

It's a bit awkward to say what else might be causing this without spending some time looking at it.

-Andy

Hi Melissa,

Penalties do actually just expire, but it isn't like there is a set time period for this, so if you have no mention in Webmaster Tools of any penalty, then you really don't have one. You won't be given the option to try and do a reconsideration request either. I am pretty sure it was John Mueller that confirmed this.

I would still go through and disavow sites that have not got back to you though, just as best practice and to do a little damage mitigation. You may find that the penalty comes back at some point in the future if you don't.

-Andy

There was a school of thought a number of years ago that thought that Google would ignore the fact that there were no spaces between two words - and for some phrases that are not as highly contested, you might find this is still the case - but I can't think of any occurrences of anything that I am working with now where concatenated words will yield the same or better results - separate the words wherever possible.

Andy

Hi Nicky,

How far off do you see the content as being published? The reason I ask if because Mobile First isn't far off and this is changing how Google indexes pages and works out the rankings.

Part of this is that they are going to start viewing the content behind a tab or accordion - the main reason for this is that Google is going to start using the mobile site for both mobile and desktop rankings and they see this as the best technique to keep mobile users happy. It is good for UX.

At the moment, Google will index that content, but it will be given a lower score than if it was all shown, but you also need to think about how a page might look without it - will it just be a huge page that you can get lost in, or is it not so big that you could have only 20 Q&A's and have it still looking good?

-Andy

Hi,

First of all, have a read of how DA is scored here. There are going to be so many factors that play a part in this that would be impossible to tell exactly why this is - most like to start looking at their backlinks, so perhaps start by checking this out using Open Site Explorer?

-Andy

As David said, you will get nothing for doing this, unless it were a re-banding exercise and was unavoidable.

Stick with what you have and just write more great content as that is where the big benefits will come from.

Andy

Hi,

There are many ways to do this depending on your site and structure.

Are you doing this to try and get the additional phrases into Google, or for usability once someone lands on your site? If you are doing it for Google, you will want to avoid duplication of pages based on naming / keyword conventions and try not to create lots of pages that only have the basics to differentiate them.

-Andy

Hey Marko,

So is this site yours? What are you trying to achieve with a scroll bar that isn't already being crawled by Google?

If you click here, you can see the cached text version of the page that shows all of the content.

b) Can it truly just be that simple?

No, a scroll bar won't help with search rankings. There will be much more at play.

-Andy

Hi Raphael,

Basically, if you are only loading in results based on when someone lands on a page, and showing results that are not pre-determined, then you are right, there is nothing really here for Google to do anything with in terms of SEO. However, done right and this shouldn't be a problem and just write some great content for the page that Google can see.

Presumably you will be using an iFrame or similar?

Andy

Hi Michael,

The problem is we are having difficulty getting the products within p= indexed*

If you have a canonical set on a p=* to the base URL, this will mean those pages never get indexed by Google.

If each page is different /p=1, /p=2 et al, then a rel prev / next will handle this for you. However, it depends on what is on each of those pages. If they are virtually identical (or at least very similar) then the solution might be to leave the canonical in place - but that doesn't sound like what you want.

If what I am reading is right, the nel=next & prev would work for you - but remove the canonical on each page. You could also use a view-all as this will work, but have a read of some of the options here. It covers what you need to know.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

-Andy

Hi,

E-commerce sites are littered with canonical issues for so many different reasons. The most common is like this, where there are cross-overs..

Your issues are probably being caused because you have a main Blue Widget page that carries everything (I assume).

Here is one way I would approach your issue... Probably not the best for your circumstance though.

-- Set canonical from Waterproof Blue Widgets to Blue Widgets
-- Set canonical from Alarm Blue Widgets to Blue Widgets

You might want to remove the primary page from Google's eyes as this could be seen as a doorway page.

The second (probably best) way is by targeting the pages a little more closely - of course, this is a little awkward to advise on because I can't see the site. You would need to add a more thorough description to the secondary pages and make sure they are very focussed. Internal links as you have described will also help here with very focused anchor texts. These links I would add high up the page in an introduction text.

I would then create some blog posts related to each product and link through from these too. Try and get the link high up in the copy again. Don't just stop at one though - you want to create hub pages for each and this is the best way to achieve it.

-Andy

I have seen this issue before and it turned out the tracking code had been accidentally placed on 2 different sites. Is there any possibility this could have happened?

Can I also suggest you give people a bit of a warning that this site is adult in nature and definitely not safe for work!

Andy

It would make more sense to transfer your site to the new domain first. Get that working correctly and ranking as it should and then you can focus on changing the design.

Here is some good information from Google on how to achieve this.

-Andy

Before I answer that, I would like to point you to this article on eConsultancy about internal linking. This is the go-to article that I show everyone and explains exactly how to do it.

Should I link every instance of "Blue Widget" to the blue widget product page or just once from each relevant page?

John Mueller has also just confirmed here, that internal linking to your product pages is not over optimisation. Here is the snippet of interest...

"In general, I don’t see any problems with internal links from articles on an e-commerce site. So if you are an expert on a topic, and you have products that belong to that topic, then maybe you will write some articles about this topic as well and give more insight on why you chose those products to sell, or the pros and cons, the variations of those products, and that is useful content to have. And that is something that sometimes does make sense to link to your product pages or the rest of your site.

So that is not something I’d see as being overly problematic. If this is done in a reasonable way, that you are not linking every keyword to different pages on your site, but rather saying this product is important, this product is important here, this is something we offer, this is something someone else offers, this is a link to the manufacturer directly. Then that is useful information to have, that is not something I’d remove."

Make articles about your Blue Widgets more Why / How, rather than 'buy these', and title the pages accordingly. Steer clear of titles that could cause duplication issues again, but there is no harm in talking about them in great detail and linking.

I hope this helps.

-Andy

Those load speeds are absolutely fine and wont be hampering any SEO efforts at all. One of my sites takes around 7 seconds to load and ranks 1st to 4th for very highly competitive phrases

It is more about the user experience, content and making sure you are attracting the right people.

If your site is built in Wordpress, look at a cache plugin to speed load times up if you want to get a little more from it.

Don't sweat about those times though

-Andy