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Thanks

Thanks, I realise the usage should be a correct relative URL or a correctly formed absolute URL. In Moz's case, they used a correctly formed absolute URL.

My question is more around...why not use "/"?

Cyto

I noticed Moz using the following for its homepage

Is this best practice though?  The reason I ask is that, I use  and I've been reading this page by Google

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

5 common mistakes with rel=canonical

Mistake 2: Absolute URLs mistakenly written as relative URLs

The tag, like many HTML tags, accepts both relative and absolute URLs. Relative URLs include a path “relative” to the current page. For example, “images/cupcake.png” means “from the current directory go to the “images” subdirectory, then to cupcake.png.” Absolute URLs specify the full path—including the scheme like http://.

Specifying (a relative URL since there’s no “http://”) implies that the desired canonical URL is http://example.com/example.com/cupcake.html even though that is almost certainly not what was intended. In these cases, our algorithms may ignore the specified rel=canonical. Ultimately this means that whatever you had hoped to accomplish with this rel=canonical will not come to fruition.

Matt has summed it up, but my question is..why don't you get a wildcard certificate?

It will make it much easier and if you ever move your website to a CDN network, an HTTPS website with a wildcard certificate makes the process smooth!

Should I address this issue now or is it too late to matter?

• Never too late

How would i do it, a link audit through a freelancer?

• Depends on your budget and time.  Rebecca's suggestion is good to use a tool like Link Detox and contact every webmaster. If you got the time to do it yourself, go for it..otherwise if you got the budget, hire a freelancer but check everything.

What do you SEO mozters recommend?

• Rebecca's post summed it up

• Webmaster tools.  Google, Bing (Yahoo) have them. Get your sitemap loaded and site set up in their webmaster tools!
• High authority backlinks. How about a wikipedia page? Or start creating some rich content that users will find useful and share? Even social media metrics come into ranking.
• Make your site run HTTPS and use a CDN
• Images and video. Don't forget users also land on your site from images and videos tabs+

What do you mean by "along with 25 other elements of the keyword.."

So your product title is automatically inserted as the alt tag of an image, so what are the other 25 elements? If it is just the title, sure I can understand and it should be fine - as long as the image is about the title.

Now if the image alt tag is stuffing other elements of a product as the img alt tag (such as other fields) then I would advice altering that automatic code.

Do it.

All 3

• canonical-url-tag,
• changing page Meta;
• and Body text.

In addition to the body text, bring in city specific and state specific content for that category. Images, text and even cross selling to make the page unique.

From my experience, change always happens..

• People might request a change in URL structure (then it will lead to 301 redirects and setting them up)
• It's better to let Google crawl a rich page than a weak page. When it comes to ecommerce sites, you don't want "page not found" as the product hasn't been published but its category page is done. If the sitemap leads to broken pages - well, customers won't like it, so don't expect bots to do either.
• I would work on your ecommerce site, get it done in preview and all ready to go. You can also setup things like Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster tools, ensure your sitemap is ready, url structure is fine and get it ready.

So my advice is to set it up and then launch. You don't want to end up "fixing" your website post launch.  Here's another way to look at it.. your credit score - it's easier to work on building a good credit score, than having to fix a bad one. SEO is the same.

Hmm, so what it comes down to is that, you can index search pages but provided they have a purpose or add value to the end user.

For instance, A user would search by category whereas an individual product search result isn't necessary when a product page exists.

Thanks Dirk for the links, helps a lot

Cyto

I have a question on indexing search pages of an ecommerce or any website. I read Google doesn't recommend this and sites shouldn't allow indexing of their search pages.

I recently attended an SEO event (BrightonSEO) and one of the talks was on search pages and how big players like eBay, Amazon do index their search pages. In fact, it is a core part of the pages that are indexed.

eBay has to do it, as their product pages are on a time frame and Amazon only allows certain category search pages to be indexed. Reviewing my competitors, they are indexing search pages and this is why they have thousands and millions of web pages indexed.

What are your thoughts? I thought search pages were too dynamic (URL strings) and they wouldn't have a unique page title, meta description or rich content to act as a well optimised page.

Am I missing a trick here?

Cyto

I would also set up your HTTPS site as a new one in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing automatically does it), but set it up in GWT. Once you have done that, make sure your sitemap is added and crawled again.

Get GWT to crawl the sitemap again from your non HTTPS account too, so redirects are recorded.

Thanks Niners52.

I moved to HTTPS and was facing the same problem. Your answer has helped.

I wonder if there is a need to submit a https sitemap on the http bing. Did you think about this?

The goal is to identify what pages are Google indexing and are there ones it shouldn't. (We don't index search pages, we don't index basket or checkout pages)

I do know know all of the subdomains and searching them individually isn't making up the total search count when I do site:company.com.

I don't have duplicate pages from my moz reports so it can't be that. If I was able to download a full google search result into a spreadsheet. I could quickly filter and see what pages are being indexed that shouldn't.

My GA is only focused on a single domain, as subdomains hold just PDFs, images etc. Traffic reports from GA are focused on www.company.com pages.

The only way I can know exactly which URLS have been indexed, seems to be going through the google search results, but it caps after 7 pages

I'm trying to download every google search results for my company site:company.com. The limit I can get is 100. I tried using seoquake but I can only get to 100.

The reason for this? I would like to see what are the pages indexed. www pages, and subdomain pages should only make up 7,000  but search results are 23,000. I would like to see what the others are in the 23,000.

Any advice how to go about this? I can individually check subdomains site:www.company.com and site:static.company.com, but I don't know all the subdomains.

Anyone cracked this? I tried using a scrapper tool but it was only able to retrieve 200.

I think Richard has found a big hole in the redirection. His research is intact, look at this URL from february 2014

https://web.archive.org/web/20040206174915/http://www.mobile-tronics.com/Prodselect.asp?CategoryID=136&BasketID=

Here's a fantastic tool I use to check redirects

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

You run the check and it's a 404 not found, no 301 is in place.

• Any rank juice those URLs have gathered is broken and not transferred. (Google does value a site with a history)
• I would still put these old URLs back as redirects to your new website. (no jumping, straight to the new URLs)
• You mentioned you did a disavow, but I take it that was only to spammy or domains of low quality, then it shouldn't make an impact as you've removed the spam.

What does Moz's crawl diagnostics say about your website say? I see simple things like a meta description missing from your new page http://www.mobile-tronics.com/mobile-tv-stands/

• Do you have duplicate content? Thin content?

Also:

• Can Google crawl your site by using "Fetch as Googlebot" in Google Webmaster Tools?
• Check your logs to confirm Googlebot is crawling your site. site:mobile-tronics.com shows just over 1000 pages, is this correct? https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Amobile-tronics.com&oq=site%3Amobile-tronics.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1505j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

I wanted to know some opinions on breadcrumbs and left hand menus on a page. Take a traditional two column page, you have the left hand navigation on the left, and page copy on the right.

The introduction of breadcrumbs serves two things

• Navigation for the user, shows structurally how the page fits
• SEO benefit - include breadcrumbs, use schema and you potentially provided more page links on a single search result.

1. Thinking about this, isn't the left hand navigation and breadcrumbs the same? The left hand navigation shows where the page fits, which is precisely what the breadcrumbs do.
2. You are doubling the links, left hand menu and breadcrumbs
3. Sure you can get rid of the breadcrumbs, but from an SEO stand point, won't you lose the ability to have breadcrumbs via schema on search results
4. Do you see breadcrumbs and menu differently, should breadcrumbs only exist on single column pages (say an ecommerce page) and left hand menu on two column pages like an article page?

Thoughts?

I'm interested to know answer to this question too. I'm about to introduce a CDN as our company is a global one and i'm hoping a CDN would reduce the page load time and thus reduce the average load time GA reports..

Curious why GA is recording worse for you.