Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi SEO Analytics,

You can start understanding how Google ranks websites by reading Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO.

Once you've finished reading it, read it again.

Cheers,

David

Hi Jeff,

You can use hreflang to target the same language in different regions.

Google provide a good example of this about halfway down this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Like in the example here, you may want to use the US version of the site as the English default and specify regions for the rest.

Cheers,

David

Hi GTAMP,

I would definitely remove the h2 tag from your site-wide header tagline.

Heading tags should be used to demonstrate a hierarchy to the content on a page and using a h2 in the site's tagline in the header is not doing this.

I wouldn't expect to see any noticeable gains from only removing the h2 tag, but it's one of those things where it all adds up in the end.

Cheers,

David

Hi Simon,

If your sites are only a few hundred pages and Moz is crawling 50k pages, you definitely have some crawl issues on your sites.

Reducing the number of pages Moz can crawl won't fix these problems - you should have a good SEO take a look at your site to find out why so many pages can be crawled and find out if they really need to be crawled (they probably don't).

You can then take the appropriate steps to improve how search engines (and crawling tools) crawl your site by blocking access to these pages.

There's really no need to change your Moz subscription level for this problem.

Cheers,

David

Hi Gianluca,

He was talking about a WordPress website which, by default, already has a 301 redirect in place on the homepage URL with the slash to the URL without the slash.

What's strange is that the Yoast SEO plugin points the homepage canonical tag to the URL with the slash - which is 301 redirected to the URL without!

I know search engines handle this very well and probably just ignore the canonical tag, but if you want it to be 100% correct (and why wouldn't you?) adding a the canonical tag in the Advanced tab is a very easy fix.

Hi Ben,

You won't get any benefit out of this and I wouldn't recommend doing it just to get "art" in the domain name.

I'd 100% stick with the established .com domain.

Cheers,

David

I believe he is talking about Breadcrumbs - not sitelinks.

To get your breadcrumb rich snippets displaying in the SERPs they must use the appropriate micro data markup.

Some examples on how to implement this can be found here: http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/#breadcrumb And here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417?hl=en

Until recently, these breadcrumb links were clickable from the SERPs but like a lot of things in SEO, this was exploited to do things that it wasn't intended to do so Google removed this feature.

You can read about clickable breadcrumb links being removed and why, here : https://www.seroundtable.com/google-breadcrumb-snippets-drop-hyperlink-19595.html

Hi Ryan,

Yes, this is the major problem with point-to-point keyword ranking reports and the reason I don't use them (take any increases or decreases with a grain of salt.)

It's possible with these type of ranking reports that G might be testing something at the time the keyword ranking is checked, which could cause it to be reported at a much higher or lower position than you would normally see it.

When looking at keyword rankings, I prefer to look at the average ranking position in Google Search Console because it gives a better indication of how keywords are performing over time.

Cheers,

David

Hi Vic,

Sounds like you are talking about a mobile-specific version of your website and not a responsive website.

I've saw this problem recently and it was because the mobile version of the site was not canonicalized properly to the desktop site.

In this case, the mobile page titles were left blank and Google generated their own by using H1 headings and the URL for branding. When the mobile site was canonicalized correctly, Google quickly started using the same specified titles as the desktop site.

To get this working properly, your desktop website should have something that looks like this:

href="http://m.example.com/page-1">

And your mobile site should have something like this:

This example was taken from Google's Mobile SEO configurations guide.

Check if you have this in place. If not, add it!

The only other time I've seen an issue like this was when the brand name wasn't actually in the page title. Google took what was specified as the WordPress 'Site name' and added that the end of all titles that had no branding.

By what you said, it sounded like you DO have branding in your titles, but if you don't, definitely add it the way want it to appear and don't make Google guess.

Cheers,

David

Hi Chase,

I agree with what Gaston said but I'll add a bit more to it:

I'd remove keyword focus for 'custom' from the homepage (in h1 and title tag, etc.) and shift that targeting to the new 'Custom Poker Chips' pages.

That would leave the homepage to target more generic 'poker chips' terms.

I'd also link to the new page in the main navigation with the anchor text 'Custom Poker Chips'.

Should be very straightforward and I don't think you'll have to worry about losing any rankings, but it may take search engines a month or two to start ranking what will be the more relevant page for users.

Cheers,

David

Hi Justin,

Sounds like you already know what you're doing!

I would proceed with exactly what you have said and wouldn't be worried at all about the loss of authority between redirecting to a URL without a / to a URL with a /. The loss of authority will be almost insignificant and you will not lose your rankings or organic traffic from from doing this.

Hi Jonathan,

There's no issue in publishing content as it's ready.

Check our Rand's WBF from last week where he says the publishing frequency doesn't exist.

If it's good content covering new topics for your site, you can only see good results.

Cheers,

David

Hi Vic,

I've had a look at the site and have the following notes:

When I search for the main keywords in the title, the brand name displays in lowercase as it should.

When i search for the brand name, Google ignores the page title and shows only the brand name and includes capitalized letters.

The other issue here is that it ranks the .com domain instead of the .co.uk domain. I used a UK IP address and Google.co.uk and still got the .com ranking for the brand search.

The reason for this is that there are no hreflang tags in place between the two sites. Are you also seeing this? (I want to make sure it's not just me!)

With the branding change on mobile, the only thing I would try is moving the brand name to the front of the title tag for the homepage. I always include branding at the front of homepage titles because Google tends to re-write them that way. I know that's not the case here with how this site appears on desktop search, but everything else looks fine and I would recommend giving it a try!

I'll be interested to see if that solves the problem.

Cheers,

David

+1 to what Gaston said!

This is the perfect example of when to use hreflang. It doesn't matter if it's a blog post or a more important page on the site - if you have international versions, use hreflang.

Cheers,

David

Hi John,

Just having a quick look at the site I can see a lot of room for improvement!

These category pages are being indexed correctly and ranking well for specific searches (eg. Correctional Services Nursing cpd) so I wouldn't recommend using canonical tags the way you are suggesting. All pages of your site should have a canonical tag pointing to themselves, but I wouldn't be using them to pass authority to other pages in this case.

The URL structure is a bit of a mess so it would be good if you could improve it from:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=9&name=Acute+Surgical+Nursing
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=6&name=Medications
To something like:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd/acute-surgical-nursing/
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd/medications/

You should also pay some attention to the duplicate Page Titles and Meta Descriptions throughout the site

Cheers,

David

Hi Dustin,

Looks like the problem is that you have two canonical tags on your parameter pages.

eg. on lines 24 and 25 of the source code for this page https://www.stickylife.com/custom/vinyl-decals?limit=30 you'll see:

With more than one canonical tag on a page, Google will ignore both canonical tags - which is why you are getting duplicate issues.

You'll need to remove the second canonical tag to overcome your issues.

Cheers,

David

Hi Netzkern,

It actually sounds like you agree with me!

The way you are talking about 'tags' is how most people tend to use categories and sub-categories. I agree that categories and sub-categories are fine (if they have sufficient content, like you said).

Generally, with 'tags', you don't need to be overly strategic with how you use them - they are usually only there for users to find more closely related content on your site (more specific than what the categories or sub-categories offer).

My general advice is to "noindex" tags and never use them to try and grow your organic traffic.

Cheers,

David

Hi Muzz,

No need to use hreflang if you only have your content available for a single region/language..

If you eventually have your content available in other regions/languages, whether it's on the same domain or a different domain, you should definitely use hreflang to ensure the locations are being served the most relevant version of your content.

Cheers,

David

Hi Becky,

Like Tymen said, separators in titles are fine - not matter which separator you choose to use.

Google will still reads and indexes the full title and will not cut off at the first separator.

I wouldn't be too concerned about where your separator is cutting off potential search queries - there are much bigger factors to consider before thinking too much about this.

Cheers,

David

Hi Chris,

I've been getting this for the last month or so. Sometimes I have to try 2-3 times but it eventually works and hasn't caused me too many issues. I figured it might've just been a busy time of the day...or it maybe it was my slow internet connection at the time...I really don't know.

Would love to know if this is a known problem that's being looked at, but like I said, it doesn't cause me too many dramas and I don't think I've had to retry more than 3 times.

Hopefully someone from Moz can say why this might be happening

Cheers,

David