Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Becky If you just think of it in terms of not losing any backlinks and so that the old URLs in Google Index don't 404, then they just need the most appropriate page on your new site to be 301'd to. You won't go wrong if you stick to this approach. If there is no relevant category, then go up to department, no department? go to home. Keep it simple & logical. Regards Nigel

You will also have to get those URLs out of the index once you fix the rel next/prev issue. In order to do that effectively, they should return a 404 or 410 status code in the HTTP header so Google knows that they no longer exist (even though they never really did in the first place). Otherwise, it's what is known as a "soft 404" in which the page doesn't really exist, but returns a 200 (OK) status code, which is confusing to Google if you don't want them indexed.

Hey Becky–here's a primer on the hreflang tag that I recommend reading: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag Essentially, if you have an international website with localized or translated versions (mexico.website.com, or website.com.mx, or website.com/mexico), you need to use rel="alternate" hreflang="es-mx" (using my Mexico example above) in the head tags of your site's pages.

Hi Becky, I agree with Yaroslav, the better practice is to use 301 redirects. Greetings

Hi Becky, As Joseph mentioned, Wistia and YouTube are two very different platforms with different goals. There are times when using both is a great strategy! So it depends on the goals you've set. YouTube is an entire platform you can build on to increase brand awareness, revenue, and get your name out there. Some businesses/marketers entire strategy is within the YouTube world. Wistia is geared towards making sure any on-site videos is as ideal as can be. So, if you are just focused on creating videos to enhance your product pages, Wistia is a great option. However, if you wanted to create videos showing off your products in a unique way and build an audience/following outside of just your site, YouTube would be your best bet. Hope that helps!

Hello Becky, Rest assured that your problem has been encountered by many other eCommerce merchants, some with much larger versions of this problem. Imagine a hardware store trying to figure out how to canonicalize a few hundred thousand nuts, bolts and screws. Most of the time, the best thing to do is make it a product variant that you can select from the page. However, if there are a handful of variants that have significantly more search volume than the others, you may want to spin those off onto their own pages. So the best answer I can give is: It depends. If you only have 80 of them, that's not at such a scale that you couldn't write unique content for all of them. But chances are you don't need 80 unique product detail pages for the same chair. Does this help? I'm happy to provide more input if you share further details about the search-share and sales-share of each variant.

Hi it’s just the phrase ‘key’ and it has a massive search volume but I imagine not much of it is buyer intent apart for people searching your brand who will be wanting to buy anyway. So it’s an example of how a tool can mislead because it’s saying you’re now number two for key and not number one so youve lost x% of that big volume. Because t I doubt there’s any real difference in analytics like you say. It’s also just flux, so you may well be back at number one by now. I see big flux for broad terms like that and the tools go crazy but analytics and search console don’t show any real differences. You‘ve some great positions that must be generating some nice conversios and roi. There are a lot of options and categories but that’s fine because you sell lots of different stuff. If It was me I’d look at the categories and just make double sure they are all organised in the best way thats getting the best UX. do you use hot jar? its been transformational for us and you can see where people are getting stuck or lost in the site with actual recordings. It’s not super expensive. i have no affiliation with them.

Hi Ed Yes would love to see the whiteboard Friday on it! No, not seeing it as an issue, more trying to workout why it's happening and how I can provide the customer with the 30 stone option - we don't sell any so I've mentioned it to the product managers. My other struggle is the changes I can actually make to the product page - this is controlled by a development team in France and we have little room to make changes which can be frustrating. You're last point about product pages interfering with one another will be a big one for me. I have so many products which are almost identical, say I have 4 x high back faux leather chairs with arms, these pages will always compete & how do you get around this? We've tried to optimise so we have variations of the keywords in the titles, so they're all slightly different, but if Google knows these are all related surely they're always going to compete? Thanks! Becky

Hi - yes I have seen this, it's been raised with our developers so waiting for the fix Thank you

Hi Becky, Without really investigating this it's hard to find an exact reason as to why you're experiencing ranking drops. You're right to check for any recent algo updates, but if there was something large - the entire SEO and digital marketing community would be losing their minds now. If I were you, I'd take some time to analyse the pages that have experienced the ranking drops, looking into the following areas: Check for algorithm updates (which you've done) Run your site and URLs through Page Speed Insights and make sure that there are no serious errors highlighted. If there are, make sure you get them fixed ASAP. Check that Google can actually see those pages, making sure that there aren't any nofollow, noindex tags in place Log into your Google Search Console account and check for any crawl errors, indexing errors & sitemap faults etc Run a crawl of your site in a tool such as Screaming Frog and check for any 404's, 302's and any redirect loops that may need to be addressed Do a full backlink analysis to make sure that any links pointing to your site are relevant and not spammy. Any low quality links pointing to your site, whether you built them recently or years ago will be having a negative effect I noticed that the URLs on your site don't use a trailing slash at the end. However, when I manually add a trailing slash, both URLs are showing as '200 OK' meaning that these can be considered as two different pages, which can cause confusion to Googlebot. I'd recommended making sure that any URLs that include a trailing slash are automatically redirected to the version without one - implement that site wide. Also, should a user search a URL on your site with a capital letter in the URL - they are being directed to a '404 Error' page. Implement a site wide redirection to make sure that any URLs that include a capital letter are then redirected to the correct lowercase version. For example: http://www.yoursite.com/proDuct > http://www.yoursite.com/product I'm sure there are a few other areas that you can look into but hopefully that provides you with a good basis. Best of luck

Ah you're right, that should be there - another one to flag to developers!

Lots of methods to how you reach out to them, but sounds like prospecting and finding them in the first place is the bigger issue. For prospecting, go start by looking for lists of blogs, eg "top gardening bloggers". Also look for non-bloggers, eg "top gardening instagram accounts". Google obvious content, eg if you're looking for fitness blogs, search "best upper body workouts" or "post workout protein options" and you'll find sites that might not show up for "top fitness bloggers". Gather them all up in a spreadsheet. Find contact info. Interact on social. Email and introduce yourself. See if you can offer a guest post with some actual highly relevant titles that they'd be interested in. It helps to already have some decent content you have produced to lend you more credibility with them, eg "here's a few past things I've published on similar topics." Consider expanding the process with tools like LinkProspector, Buzzstream, Pitchbox, Just Reach Out (this one seems to have good training wheels for people new to outreach) - that can help you scale up the number of sites you can find and contact. But it helps to use them once you have done the process a couple times. As you mentioned, will take awhile when you don't know the niche. But you can learn the space pretty quickly

Yup, can do the same approach with SF. You can run it in List Mode which will let you upload the list of URLs to crawl, and you can set up an Extraction to separate out the h3s (Configuration > Custom > Extraction) Paul

For your pages, do you focus pages with similar products on one/a few similar keywords? Yes.  As an example, lets say we sell "coffee makers".  We will have a generic coffee maker page that lists many different coffee makers from various manufacturers.   When a shopper clicks on one of the coffee maker models, they go to a page that sells the coffee maker, its accessories and its cleaning products.  All of these are unique content with very little reuse of the accessory language on other pages. Do you add written content directly to these pages or focus on creating good user guides etc then link back to these product pages? We include the most important "user guide" information on the product/accessory page.  This is information that helps select the item.  We don't list the full user guide information, but give the shopper a link to a much more detailed page of user information.  Both of these compete in search and often they appear in positions #1 and #2 in Google search.  The product/accessory page might link to several "user guide pages".   Sometimes we have positions #1, #2 and #3 in Google for searches on the product itself or product information. The above is very costly to produce and it requires an author who really knows the product.  It is only worth doing where there is good money to be made on a single sale and recurring consumable/accessory/parts/etc. sales are possible. This type of presentation is intended to make you the expert in the field, rank #1 and inspire people to pay you full MSRP because they know that you know what you are doing rather than being a buy/resell merchant.

I'm surprised to say... that SSL certificate you have is very poor quality and has a number of pretty significant security issues, in addition to the SHA-1 encryption.] To answer your specific question, there's nothing you or your devs can do about the SHA-1 encryption problem, as that problem exists on one of the certificates in the chain that is owned and controlled by Thawte (the cert issuer or "Certificate Authority"), not your own certificate. It is up to them to fix it. As you can see from the cert security scan, there are a number of other issues with the certificate that are unacceptable. Especially in a paid certificate. [Edited for clarity - some of those warnings are likely server-specific, meaning the server is being allowed to communicate with certificate in less than optimal ways] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.key.co.uk It's unlikely that the encryption problem is whats giving the "not secure" warning on the site at the moment (although it will become a major issue later in February) so you'll  need to keep looking for resources called over HTTP if you're still getting warnings. When I had a quick look at the home page, I didn't see any more warnings, as it appears you've fixed the image call that Andrew mentioned. You can use Chrome or Firefox Dev Tools to inspect any pages that are not secure to be shown exactly what element is causing the failure. It often comes down to hardcoded images like those in CSS/background images etc, or hardcoded scripts. For example, your Quotations page is calling a script from Microsoft to validate the form, but it's failing as it's called over HTTP. Knowing this, you'd want to check any other pages using such form validation. A thorough Screaming Frog crawl to look for any other wayward HTTP calls can also help dig our the remaining random culprits. Hope that helps? Paul Sidenote: Your certificate authority is Thawte, which is connected with Symantec. Which has done such a bad job of securing their certificates that Chrome and other browsers no longer trust them and are in the near future are going to be officially distrusted and ignored. Symantec has in fact given up their Certificate Authority status and is transferring their business to a new company which does have a trusted infrastructure for issuing certificates. So you're going to need to deal with a new certificate in the not too distant future anyway. Given the poor security of your existing cert, and the upcoming issues, if it were me, I'd be asking for a refund of my current cert, and replacing it with one from a more reliable issuer. I know that can mean a lot of extra work, but as these existing problematic certs go through the distrust process over the next 8 months, sites that haven't dealt with the issue are going to break. It's possible that Thawte will build out a reliable process for migrating. At the very least, you need to have a strong conversation with your issuer about how to insure you are getting the security and long-term reliability you've paid for. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news that is a much bigger issue. You can read up about it more here: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust-symantec.html

Alick300 is right the text links have more value than a button link

Hi, it is hard to tell because I do not know the URL of the site so cant look at anything really. It appears to be a security certificate error and may have to do with an SSL Handshake Exception. I would ask the developer to make sure that the Certificate and everything on the site is set correctly to use the certificate. Here is a link to a Stackoverflow.com article on that error message. If you go a Google search for that error it can be caused by many different things I hope this helps. Best Regards

I also want to know about the SEO structure in terms of content especially when you are working for an E-commerce site. I'm working for an Arabic gum product and I want to increase its organic search.