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Nice. My last question, if you don't mind is - do you feel there would be an impact to rankings/traffic if we went back - a year and a half later - to edit the redirect file?

Thanks Logan -

Just to be clear - in the redirect file then, we'd have a setup which is basically (old domain url) directed to (new domain url+utm parameters?).

That's interesting. I'd never heard of using the UTM codes in a redirect file.

Thanks Peter.

The source does not show up in our analytics. To be clear, the site is no longer active, we just redirected its major URL's to appropriate locations of our website.

We can definitely try to take a look at the server logs though, - thanks!

My company acquired another domain/website several year's ago. We want to see - for accounting purposes, how much traffic/revenue that site's REDIRECTS are driving to our website now. Is there any way to pull this information?

I thought of comparing when the site was originally redirected to our traffic/revenue changes - but so much has changed from the acquisition that I wouldn't have faith in this value. Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

Thanks FCBM!

I hadn't considered the reformatting Google tends to do anyway.At this point, I haven't seen any where this is the case 'in the wild' for our brand (maybe they've recognized that it doesn't affect the clickthrough on our stuff?). They simply just let it cut off since they're mostly over the 55 or so limit.

I think a test is in order as well. Thanks!

I'm in the middle of redesigning title tags on a large ecommerce site - approximately 9000 product pages.

The old structure was -(product name/description) | (Website/Brand)

So an example would be -

Big League Chew - 13 oz. | Target       - With 'Target' Being the site's brand and appearing on each.

With Google's new Title Tag display, our title tags are too long now. Unfortunately, our Brand/Website is HUGE - over 18 characters. My question is two fold -

1. Is it OK to remove brand from the title tags of some particularly long names? Will this impact ranking?

2. Does Google look for brand in these title tags, and more specifically: brand consistency in title tags?

I'd love to cut the brand out of some as the product name is the biggest click-through element by far - but I don't want to affect rankings. My 'gut' says that I should focus on clickthrough rate with title tags and cut brand where necessary. Does anyone have thoughts on this?

Yeah exactly - keeping that personal identity is where search is headed - it'd be nice if Moz would develop a similar model :).

Hey Moz -

I just had a question regarding the Moz Pro Account.

Sometimes I find myself torn between using my personal Moz account, and the Moz Pro Account associated with my company (and my team).

Is there a way to link a personal account WITH a company pro account, so I could post as myself, build my own cred, but still enjoy the benefits of Pro on my company's dime?

Thanks!

Thanks Andy and Travis -

Yeah, I think the enhancement and/or citation route is probably the safest for us. Thanks for your help!

Thanks Bill -

You're exactly right - I'm definitely not considering redirecting the entire site for the reasons you point out - there ARE some shady practices to the product pages in particular.

What I'm wondering though is if I can at least gleam some content authority from individual articles and such?

Just to clarify the whole 'bad' content thing. The content is outdated but was good in its day..and did acquire links. It needs updated and improved..which I am prepared to do.

Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though.

What would be the best practice here?

1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website?

2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article

3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain.

Thanks for your input.

Great stuff Corey, thanks for your response. We have made the decision here to implement at our item level, so I'm pretty excited. We're in a fairly competitive niche where no one has implemented this yet (including some REALLY large competitors), so I'm pretty optimistic that ranking and CTR improvements should follow.

Granted, Bing's not Google, but many of their ranking factors overlap. Bing has done a great job responding to me directly regarding issues with their webmaster tools and such. We did specifically ask them the question about our pages not indexing and they provided a constructive answer. Getting ahold of Google seems all-but impossible - but, if you're going to try, I suggest dealing with the most specific product as possible - lots of their newer products seem to have better product support (their new PLA/Merchant Center or Google+ for example). Also, if you're an Adwords user, it's (theoretically) easier to go through your Adwords Rep., or Adwords help since you're a paying advertiser. We used to use a large 3rd party firm to manage our ads, and had success going to their Google rep. for questions/answers. Hope this helps.

My company is beginning the process of implementing Schema.org markup on our product pages (moderately sized ecommerce website). Due to the complexity of our templates in regards to the ERP solution we're using, we'll have to work with outside developers to guarantee a proper install..so it'll involve more investment on our end than a standard code adjustment.

After looking over the Schema tags, I noticed that many of them match-up to the same fields in the Google Product Feed (not entirely surprising). I've also noticed that Google tends to be WAY more strict when it comes to product feed data requirements and validity.

Does anyone know if Google is or will use Schema markup as a potential quality factor in determining bid cost for PLA ads? I'm just looking for another reason to justify the template mods :). Thanks!

Thanks David, but at this point that information is outdated. I recently sent a request directly to Facebook regarding this issue - but at the current time, there doesn't seem to be a way to combine the two (at least that I, or anyone I've spoken to can find).

Hi, thanks for your response, and I apologize for the delay in responding!

In our current state, removing the AJAX links would be extremely difficult.

We do actually have the AJAX Crawling Protocol in place, which is, conceivably why Google is able to crawl us and our rankings are basically unchanged.

After speaking again with Bing's Support, they did acknoledge that they DO follow the escaped_fragment we set up, but that a rel="canonical" tag to the non-AJAX version was creating what they called in infinite indexation loop..whereby a java redirect at the non-AJAX, sent them to the AJAX, and a rel canonical sent them back to the non-AJAX. They suggested that if we wanted them to index the "Pretty" AJAX version, we remove the rel canonical pointing to the non-AJAX url. They didn't suggest putting the Pretty AJAX url in the rel canonical - I'm wondering if they may be a solution?Ideally, we'd have them index the non-AJAX url (though it seems like that isn't possible? Sorry this is so convoluted!)

In the meantime, we've removed rel canonical entirely from this level of our website..but at the moment rankings haven't really been affected.

Any suggestions? It feels like AJAX may be just completely inadvisable for Bing.

Hello. I've been going back and forth with Bing technical support regarding a crawling issue on our website (which I have to say is pretty helpful - you do get a personal, thoughtful response pretty quickly from Bing).

Currently our website is set with a java redirect to send users/crawlers to an AJAX version of our website. For example, they come into - mysite.com/category..and get redirected to mysite.com/category#!category. This is to provide an AJAX search overlay which improves UEx. We are finding that Bing gets 'hung up' on these AJAX pages, despite AJAX protocol being in place. They say that if the AJAX redirect is removed, they would index and crawl the non-AJAX url correctly - at which point our indexation would (theoretically) improve.

I'm wondering if it's possible (or advisable) to direct the robots to crawl the non-AJAX version, while users get the AJAX version. I'm assuming that it's the classic - the bots want to see exactly what the users see - but I wanted to post here for some feedback. The reality of the situation is the AJAX overlay is in place and our rankings in Bing have plummeted as a result.

This post was derived from the fact that our website, which uses AJAX and AJAX urls formatted using Google's crawl guidelines (and ranks well), is being completely misread by BingHoo's bots (and destroying our rankings).

After some research, we found that Bing's tools used to contain an option for their crawlers to interpret AJAX-infused urls, but that this feature was removed with the latest update.

I've seen others post on this issue with no response, so I figured I'd post the customer support email we received below - kind of strange thing to receive. Takeaway - even AJAX done right is rough in BingHoo.

(sorry I can't post my site here..).

Hello,

This is Roxanne of Bing Technical Support and I will be assisting you with this issue.

I understand that you cannot find the Configure Bing for AJAX Crawling box in Bing Webmaster. Let me explain.

We appreciate your feedback about Bing Webmaster tools. We regret to inform you that Bing Webmaster Tools is no longer directly supporting AJAX. We'll pass this feedback onto our Bing development team.

If you are having ajax-specific related issues with your site in Webmaster tools, please let us know.

We apologize for the time spent and the inconvenience this may have caused you.  If you should require further clarification and need more assistance, please feel free to reply to this email.

Thank you and have a great day!

Regards,

Roxanne

Bing Technical Support

Hi Brandon,

This is a great question, and one I too cannot find a straight answer for either. I found that article you reference as well, and wasn't able to find the enable option either. If I had to guess, I'd say no - they don't know how to handle it. My site was recently changed to integrate an AJAX based search product at our category page level. The url structures and server responses are designed to Google's standards regarding AJAX crawl ability, but our rankings on these category pages have basically disappeared in Bing/Hoo. The underlying HTML is full of crawlable links as well to compensate. Hopefully someone chimes in with an answer.