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On an large ecommerce site the main navigation links to URLs that include a legacy parameter. The parameter doesn’t actually seem to do anything to change content - it doesn’t narrow or specify content, nor does it currently track sessions. We’ve set the canonical for these URLs to be without the parameter. (We did this when we started seeing that Google was stripping out the parameter in the majority of SERP results themselves.)

We’re trying to best strategize on how to set the parameters in WMT (search console).

Our options are to set to:

1. No: Doesn’t affect page content’ - and then the Crawl field in WMT is auto-set to ‘Representative URL’.

(Note, that it's unclear what ‘Representative URL’ is defined as. Google’s documentation suggests that a representative URL is a canonical URL, and we've specifically set canonicals to be without the parameter so does this contradict? )

OR

2. ‘Yes: Changes, reorders, or narrows page content’

And then it’s a question of how to instruct Googlebot to crawl these pages:

'Let Googlebot decide' OR 'No URLs'.

The fundamental issue is whether the parameter settings are an index signal or crawl signal. Google documents them as crawl signals, but if we instruct Google not to crawl our navigation how will it find and pass equity to the canonical URLs?

Thoughts?

Posted by Susan Schwartz, Kahena Digital staff member

Hi Moz community,_**[Posting for one of our staff members ] **_One of our clients has difficulty attracting a national and international market potentially due to their brand name including a geo-location modifier. We believe that it may be a combination of search engine algorithms incorrectly assuming that the brand is location specific as well as human users perceiving this. I can't reveal the brand but a similar example may be "Houston Cheese-makers". This company wants to attract national and international customers and not be restricted to just Houston. It appears that both search engines and human users are understanding the brand to be limited just to Houston. The client does not want to re-brand. The brand also has a Google Plus Local entity verified against their headquarters location in Houston. We have considered the following tasks to help alleviate this restriction:

• Changing site messaging to include modifiers such as "national", "USA" and "international" (title-tags, meta-descriptions, on-page text etc).
• Including a testimonial page that has testimonials from multiple international locations (eg "Joe Blogs from Sydney, Australia says...").
• Changing the title tag format site-wide from "page-name | Houston Cheese-makers" to an abbreviated version such as "page-name | HCM" or "page-name | H Cheese-makers".
• Schema tags - is there any specific tags that can send a signal about the global presence of the brand?

What other techniques can help alleviate this problem? Is the Google Plus Local page potentially hampering this as well? Has anyone had a similar experience and can shed some light?Thanks so much!

the destination URL should 100% be absolute!

301 Redirects should always be programmed and thought of us relative to full path.

in htaccess, it should look like this:

redirect 301 /old-page-name.html http://www.full-website-name.com/new-page-name.html
redirect 301 /old-page-name2.html http://www.full-website-name.com/new-page-name2.html

and so on and so forth..

Which pages lost traffic - old ones or new ones? If you could send an example (or email it if you're willing) id be happy to take a peak.

I've definitely seen ranking bumps due to fixing this sort of redirect-canonical paradox. XML Sitemap that is inconsistent just adds insult to injury.

Your redirects, canonical tags, and XML sitemap should be completely consistent in terms of URL structure, protocol used (http vs https), etc. I highly suggest 'canonicalizing' all of these - agree on one protocol for whole site or for different sections of the site (http vs https), one sub-domain format (www vs non-www), and one method of accessing each piece of content (filter out unnecessary parameters, etc).

I find that when you can really consolidate and get rid of diluted dupe-URLs ("index bloat") than you can reach your full potential in terms of rankings.

But in short - if URL A has a canonical tag that points to URL B which then redirects back to URL A - it can be extremely confusing to the search engines. Best case - they ignore your canonicals. Worst case - index bloat and serious confusion.

Hope that helps!

This seems to be a concerted effort on Google's part to start revoking Adwords API access to SEO specific toolsets. First Raven, now SEOMoz. This is a statement, ... a declaration of war even...not a coincidence. It will be interesting to see if tools whose userbase are more disproportionately using the API to alter campaigns (PPC users) will be left alone.

Aaron,

Please also let us know - via our pro address or here, whichever.

Perhaps.. but I think this is really connected to being 'good for the user' - as cliche as it sounds. If Google sees clickstream abnormally 'high' for position 1 for brand terms, then they are sure this is what the user wants.. so why not expand those site-links to allow for better landing pages for the user. When searching for 'Gap' why not already have the options for 'mens', 'womens', 'baby', etc. And when searching for 'nordstroms shoes' - why not already have the option for 'boots', 'sandals', 'pumps', etc.

Personally I think its a good thing for people to find what they want faster.

I'd bet 95% of people would not be happy landing on an affiliate site when they meant to find the brand site..

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Totally agree with you Jamie regarding it being a game changer. Branded terms where competitors were trying to rank organically are now seriously pushed down due to jumbo sitelinks. For local businesses, Google is also embeddeding local place page snippets - it ends up taking up half of the SERP real estate!

I imagine it will get harder for SERP trackers to scrape - needing to differentiate between large sitelinks and actual organic listings.