Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi tcope25,

Thanks for the clarification, that helps me to understand better the end goal. To futher clarify, you say "we want every other visitor in the world to visit our international subdomain." Do you mean "every other [English speaking] visitor in the world." ? If so, I think your proposed code is close. It is now just missing a self-referencing element, so it should be:

Just keep in mind that even if your tags are perfect, if your English US site has significantly more authority, it may show up in international search results anyway as rel="alternate" hreflang is a signal, not a directive.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi tcope25,

Implementing rel="alternate" hreflang is likely one of the most complex, and most commonly incorrectly implemented elements for SEO. Just the example you've provided above would take about 30 minutes to talk through, clarify business needs, and then determine a course of action.

I normally don't push off answering a question, but I would highly recommend seeking out an SEO professional to help you sort this out. Tere's just a lot wrong with the proposed code above - sorry, not trying to be insulting, but helpful.

One real standout in your proposed code above that I would not recommend is to set your "x-default" to one of your secondary international sites. The "x-default" if used, should point to your strongest, primary version of your business sites. For example, if your English site in the US is your primary, most important site, then your "x-default" should the English US site URL.

Also based on your code above, it looks like you are serving the same content, via the same URLs to US and Canada searchers. If this is true , meaning you are not localising content for Canada and it is 100% the same page (I hope you aren't showing different content to US and Canada visitors via the same URL by attempting to use geo-location to decide what they see - that's a whole separate SEO issue) - then you don't need "en-us" and "en-ca" you just need "en" - But you would need to be sure that you haven't set your International Targeting in Google Search Console to "United States" - You need to leave the country targeting there unchecked.

This are very high level observations - I would recommend engaging a reliable SEO consultant to help make sure it's all implemented correctly.

Hi QubaSEO,

This is how I would explain this to a client whose knowledge of SEO is limited:

"The way your site is currently set up, all content located on pages that are not 'Page 1' in a series of pages, is not being crawled or indexed by search engines. It is being given zero value. As a result, you are missing out on gaining relevant traffic from searchers looking for the content that you have on pages other than page 1."

If they have spent money and time creating that content on pages 2, 3 etc), or if they are an eCommerce site and they care about selling all of their products (not just products displayed on page 1), then they are significantly inhibiting their return on that investment.

You probably already have this https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

We are currently implementing the SEO module for Endeca faceted navigation. Our development team has proposed URLs to be structured in this way:

Main category example: https://www.pens.com/c/pens-and-writing/

As soon as a facet is selected, for example "blue ink" - The URL path would change to https://www.pens.com/m/pens-and-writing/blue-ink/_/Nvalue (the "N" value is a unique identifier generated by Endeca that determines what products from the catalog are served as a match for the selected facet and is the same every time that facet is selected, it is not unique per user).

My gut instinct says that this change from "/c/" to "/m/" might be very problematic in terms of search engines understanding that /m/pens-and-writing/blue-ink/ as part of the /c/pens-and-writing/ category.

Wouldn't this also potentially pose a problem for the flow of internal link equity?

Has anyone ever seen a successful implementation using this methodology?

Hi all,

We have an opening for a Senior SEO Associate. Would love to hire someone in the Moz Community. Here are the details: Sr SEO Associate https://g.co/kgs/Ucwzp7

Cheers,

Dana

Martijn is correct. The answer is Yes.

Can you provide a little more information? Where s the Q&A section at the bottom of your product pages redirecting to? Is there any way to update the source of the redirect to be the redirect [end] URL? If so, no redirects would be needed at all. If that's not an option, why not just change all the 302's to 301's? If you really don't want that content crawled or indexed, then yes, you could block via robots.txt or a no index tag, but you may need to use the remove URL feature in Google Search Console to get any URLS that have already been indexed out of Google. If you can provide more details maybe I could answer more completely.

Hi Steve,

This appears to be schema used to help search engines understand the nature of content in objects containing "stuff" that search engines have trouble completely understanding. For example, I found keywords as possible markup element for a Video: http://schema.org/VideoObject

I don't think this plays into rankings at all. Google is so over that kind of easy manipulation. However, I DO think that when these are marked up in conjunction with ALT attributes for images, or transcriptions for videos, they can help Google understand the semantic relevance of that content. For example (and I am totally making this up), imagine a video of a veterinarian administering vaccines to an animal. During the video the vet keeps referring to the animal as "the patient." So from the transcript, a search engine (or someone who's visually impaired) wouldn't know that this video is about medicine for animals instead of humans. Using the schema.org markup for keywords would allow terms like "animal vaccine best practices" to be included to help search engines understand better what the content is really about.

That's my 2 cents. Hope it helps!

Dana

I agree with Christian. In the example you give above, the article is in Hindi. That being the case, a translated URL using Hindi would be the one I would choose.

Hi Steve,

This is a great question. I think it depends entirely on how much search volume there is surrounding the other variants for "refurbished" parts. If there's a reasonable amount, I'd recommend giving them their own URLs. I know this is harder because if they are substantively similar, producing unique content could be more difficult. I believe you can use schema.org markup to indicate "condition" [http://schema.org/OfferItemCondition] - This would help search engines understand that these items are unique from each other in important ways.

As long as it was clear to both humans and search engines that these power tools are uniquely different from each other in some way, I'd opt for the separate URLs and optimize them for long-tail terms.

If the only difference were color, say a power tool came in red or black, then maybe I would consider making these attributes that didn't necessarily influence the URL. Again there would be the caveat of search volume. If there was significant search volume for different colors, than having separate URLs and schema markup for each would be the way to go.

This is a similar type of question eCommerce site merchandisers (and SEOs!) ask themselves when strategizing how to handle faceted navigation. What combinations of facets warrant their own URLs and which ones do not? I would let search demand guide your answer.

Thanks all for the help. After digging a little deeper I discovered that Yoast's inability to run properly in our blog wasn't because of the theme, but because "Your hosting environment does not support PHP's Document Object Model. To enjoy all the benefits of the page analysis feature, you'll need to (get your host to) install it."

Hi all,

WordPress isn't my area of specialty in terms of themes and identifying what a blog might currently be using.

Here's the link:  http://www.pens.com/blog

I've had one developer tell me this blog is on the Genesis framework and another one told me it is not. Can someone weigh in here and also give me some tips on how to know one way or the other?

If it is not on the Genesis Framework, can you provide any helpful links/tutorials on how to get this blog onto the Genesis Framework? We want to be able to use Yoast SEO and apparently our current theme will not allow us to do so. Thanks in advance!

Dana

Hi Becky,

Multiple H1s isn't the serious issue it used to be for SEO. Still, well-organized heading tags are great for usability and can indicate to search engines that you have spent time creating a well-organized page. Search engines also have gotten pretty smart and understand that heading tags are also being used many times for stylistic purposes, so I don't think these are going to have a huge impact on crawl budget. Your site architecture (what's linking to what) is going to impact that, not necessarily whether a navigational element is labeled with a heading tag or not.

If you want to take a stab at re-organizing the heading tags on your PDPs so they make more sense, particularly from an accessibility perspective, install the Fangs add-on in Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/fangs-screen-reader-emulator/

This will allow you to see your page as a screenreader would see it. Click on the "Headers" tab in the Fangs resulting page and you'll see something like this [screenshot attached]

The numbers next to each bit of text represent the heading number attached to that text....notice how they are not in any kind of hierarchical order? Not a great experience for someone using a screenreader or for a search engine trying to understand what is important on this page. You could use this output list as a map and then number headings accordingly. There may be a good number of things that just don't need a heading at all, but that just need styles attached.

Hope this helps!

Dana

vY4ad0J.png

Hi vtmoz. Did you change your domain name? Or just migrate to a different CMS?

Martijn's answer is correct. To elaborate: You must include the XML sitemaps on all the sitemaps referenced in that same sitemap. If you don't, Google Search Console will identify return tag errors. Every url in your sitemap that references an equivalent URL on another country's site, must have a correlating "return" URL coming back to the originating pages from tthe hreflang XML sitemap associated with that other country's site.

Hi Dmitri,

I also see the homepage in Google, but very few pages indexed beyond that, so there does appear to be a serious problem. I don't see anything immediately regarding problems with robots.txt or no index tags. Screaming Frog was able to crawl this site without any problems.

One thing I did see in the few pages that are indexed is the presence of a lot of internal search results pages being indexed.

For example:

https://www.hauteheadquarters.com/shop/rings/2?sort_price=ascandhttps://www.hauteheadquarters.com/shop/rings/2?sort_price=descThese two pages are exactly the same products, just in different order. This page also exists: https://www.hauteheadquarters.com/shop/rings/2 - the same products again. For all practical purposes all three of these pages are exactly the same content. Unfortunately, they price sort pages are not blocked from being crawled and indexed AND they are using self-referencing canonical tags.Based on pages like these and other duplicate/thin content issues across the site, I wouldn't rule out a Panda Penalty. It is highly likely that this site may have been penalized. Just because there is no manual action doesn't mean a penalty isn't in play.Recommendations:1. Audit sitewide content and determine which pages should be in Google2. Implement directives in the robots.txt file to prevent the URLs containing query parameters that don't provide unique content from being crawled.3. Implement canonical tags referencing the original URL without query parameters. Examplehttps://www.hauteheadquarters.com/shop/rings/2?sort_price=ascandhttps://www.hauteheadquarters.com/shop/rings/2?sort_price=descShould both be canonicalized to https://www.hauteheadquarters.com/shop/rings/24\. Rebuild the XML sitemap and include only important URLs5. Resubmit the XML sitemap in GSC Wait a anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks after resubmitting the sitemap, then evaluate if this has remedied the problem.Don't file a reconsideration request. This won't do any good because if it is a penalty, it was done via the algorithm and not manually.Hope that helps a little and good luck!Sincerely,Dana

I agree with Logan. If the total number of URLs in your master sitemap is 50,000 or less, you can do one sitemap. If it's more, split it into multiples.

You should mark Logan's answer as a good answer.

Sincerely,

Dana

Hi Mike,

EGOL's answer is a good one. You should mark it so (hint, hint, nudge,nudge, know what I mean?)

Cheers,

Dana

Thank you Sarah for responding. I appreciate that and have no doubt that this is a difficult time for all involved.

Thomas said something pivotal:

"One of the largest differentiating factors of Moz and every other SAAS SEO toolset including those with excellent documentation is there best in class Q&A."

• I use Ahrefs almost every day...Do I interact with their community? Do I read their blog? Do I know any of their names? No
• I use SEMRush every day...Do I interact with their community? Do I read their blog? Do I know their names? No
• I use Screaming Frog every day...So I interact with their community? Do I read their blog? Do I know their names? No
• Raven Tools...tools too complicated and too hard to explain to executive leadership...don't use the tools, no community, no significant blog.

Moz IS its community. The community is the viable thing....frankly the software kinda, well, isn't very good.

Blogs and Communities that make money, a lot of money: Huffington post, Mashable

Perhaps the wiser route would be to make Moz a leader in the publishing space instead of chasing around SAAS, which clearly hasn't worked thus far.

Just some thoughts. But as Thomas wisely points out as a businessman, the community is Moz's point of differentiation. Lose that, and you're just another software company, and there are already a bunch of companies doing that better.

Dana

Hi Bob,

I second Paul. His answer is a good one. Hope we helped you.

Sincerely,

Dana