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Andy, Tough question, this may help: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479312.aspx KJr

Hi, Thanks for you advice. I don't see what you see with Amazon, in fact I see something very strange - http://d.pr/i/1ik1T The product reviews sit in their /product-review/ directory and these urls appear to be no index, no followed. They also have a canonical back to the original product page - why bother if the url is no indexed? If I've got that right it would seem Amazon don't get the full value of the millions of pages or product reviews they have?! This from the Google url you referenced seems to sort out my problem thanks! rel="next" and rel="prev" are orthogonal concepts to rel="canonical". You can include both declarations. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:

This is what so frustrating, ridiculous and weird is - Google doesn't really know what exactly going on in their system. Thanks to multi-layered project management, machine learning etc.

That seems like too much work. I would do this instead: Add rel=canonical on the non-/ version Use htaccess to force the non-/ version And update the sitemaps

That's my point, you only need to worry about the pages that had external links Thanks

Thanks. BTW in my original question I used the word spanner a couple times when I meant hammer which probably confused some people. I've edited it. I prefer hammers anyway

Hi Andy, Here are the things that I would do to troubleshoot this problem (you have probably already done some of these things but here we go): Check robots.txt to make sure none of the page's resources are being blocked there Make sure you have no render-blocking CSS or JS happening above the static resources that may be causing the render tool to time out or otherwise not render the text Use the MozBar to view the page with JavaScript disabled, and then with the User-Agent set as Googlebot, to see how the page looks/whether the unrendered content is visible that way Right-click the unrendered content and select "Inspect Element" to get a detailed view of the HTML element and make sure the content is appearing (this will give you a more detailed view than using "View Source" would) Google a block of the unrendered text in quotes to see if that content on that page is, in fact being indexed If the page passes all of those tests, it might just be that the text content on your page is big enough that the Fetch + Render tool isn't rendering all of it to save on bandwidth. This is what I suspect is happening especially since the missing content isn't showing up in the list of resources Google couldn't access. Sometimes the render tool doesn't fully render large blocks of static text content (at one point their guidelines suggested that they started limiting after 200 KB of visible text, but that page appears to have been updated to remove that information). Basically this happens because one of Google's top expenditures is bandwidth - it takes a tonnnnn of data, and therefore money, to crawl and index the web, which is why things like crawl budgets are important. So sometimes they save themselves some bandwidth by not fully rendering static resources in the fetch and render tool. If the content is being indexed, I wouldn't worry about it.

Hi Andy I'm also seeing this on one of our own sites, as well as a lot of other websites in our own sector. From what I can see in webmaster tools, there was a big drop in the crawl rate around 21st of October for a few days and then the crawl rate picked up to normal levels within a few days. However, looking at the cache date of the homepage as well as other category pages, the date of 20 to 22nd of October seem fixed. But, newly added pages are being indexed. This is strange to say the least! Maz

I can only think of 2 real alternatives that would do you any good: Create separate pages that show only the content in your click-to-expand sections (being sure to add canonical tags where appropriate) and have those pages linked to from the footer, a sitemap, or whatever section you see fit. Place the content from the click-to-expand sections in alt-text for whatever buttons / images / etc. that you're using to guide users to the content. This should, in theory, still be crawled, and would act as any other alt-text does; meaning that it would allow those who can't view your content to still see a text version of it. While it's odd that Google would denounce click-to-expand content, they've always had a weird distaste for javascript and other useful codes on occasion. Whatever you do, I think it's always important to place the value of UX over SEO. But that's just my insight. Good luck!

HI Andy, It really depends on the sector and the competition but I have seen quite a few examples of strong rankings in both the US and the UK for travel sites. This is a competitive sector although granted the rankings I was looking at were within niche and destination specific segments. If the site already has strong general metrics then a few decent incoming local links (and if needed adding some country specific hreflang content) is sometimes enough to give you a good boost. If on the other hand the sector is quite competitive with different market leaders in the two countries then it can be pretty tough.

What you're seeing isn't unusual.  In fact, I've seen a single page show rich snippets when it's returned as a result from one query, and no rich snippets for the same page shown in the results for a different query.  Google appears to be doing some analysis of the query itself (and maybe the match between the query and the particular result?) to determine whether rich snippets are helpful or not. Similarly, you'll probably find that your own Google+ authored pages show without the authorship info (photo, name, # of circles, etc.) if you're logged in to Google, but WITH the authorship info if you're logged out, or logged in as a different user.

Indeed that is another question. I suppose it might if you use it as a second instance of describing 'x with y' in a page's text although the word 'with' is so generic in many instances that I'm not sure it would make a huge difference... I could be wrong though!

Hi, Thanks for your response, I actually agree with you on G+ growth. I said "possible Google pull away from non G+ social signals (in favour of rel author)".

If Google tried to avoid aggregators & removed 2 domain results from serps, so what will be in the results then?

Arrghhhhh, well blow me down, if only they named it the pirate penalty, such an opportunity for pirate blogging hilarity me harties! I think this is small beans for most people and is just another tweak to better assign or remove trust to a given site and use that in the ranking signals.

Why don't you move everything to the root domain? You can keep all the subdomains in existence and put in 301 redirects from the sub-domain to the root domain and then any links that may be coming in you just ask to get them changed? Then the search feature also is tweaked to only look at root domain? This would simplify the site a lot and make it much easier to manage in the long term. Just my opinion, but hope it helps. P.S. Spend the money wisely, we're in a recession don't you know?

Hi Andy, I've just replied to your PM. Hope it helps!

Thank you. THANK YOU!