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Hi

Did you check this article on infinite scrolling from Google Webmaster tools?

Without seeing the actual site it's just guessing - if you have thousands of pages that are listed I guess that it doesn't really make sense to use rel next/previous.

You could consider to only index the first page of the category and put a canonical on the remaining pages.

Are these category pages valuable as landing pages? If not - you could put noindex/follow to make sure that the underlying pages get indexed.

Hope this helps

Dirk

Hi,

In most cases having duplicate content is not going to punish/hurt you in terms of SEO (unless it's deceptive content) - see https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

It remains however best practice to make sure that content on only one unique url - the example you give seems to be a text book example of 'when to use canonicals' - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

The fact that Google doesn't seem to index the #! pages is probably related to the fact that these pages have few incoming links and that it's making the correct guess that these duplicate pages are not really important. You should also take into account that the site: command is not necessarily giving you all the pages that are indexed.

Long answer to confirm that you better add the canonical.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

Not sure where you see the popup - it looks like a normal dropdown navigation (it's triggered by javascript but the links are in the HTML).

I would get over the concept of wasting link juice on internal links - it's absolutely normal (and even good for your visitors) to have pages like 'about us, contact us' and there is no need to hide these links using javascript or by putting nofollow's on them.

Check this article from Matt Cutts on linksculpting - a similar question can be found here - to quote the answer:

"No following those links (=hiding in your case) such as contact us does not mean that link juice is retained for the other pages you want to rank for. "

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Dave,

Because it's a bot that's examining the site you need the hreflang & geo-targeting. Algorithms are not perfect, and mistakes do happen, but I am convinced that on the long run you win by staying close to the guidelines (and certainly by putting the benefits of your visitors/customers first).

Personally, I think this whole duplicate content issue is a bit overrated (and I am not only one - check this post on Kissmetrics). In most cases, when finding duplicate content Google will just pick one of the sites to show in the results, and not show the others, unless the duplicate content has a clear intent of spamming. Panda is mainly about thin and/or low quality content, or content duplicated from other sites (without hreflang/geotargeting etc) so I would consider the risk in this case rather low.

There was a discussion on Google product forums which is quite similar to this one (Burberry had a massive traffic drop on it's US site) - and the answer from JohnMu from Google was quite similar to the answer I gave: use geo targeting & hreflang.

rgds,

Dirk

410 & 404's are treated almost the same way by bots (the 410 just gives a stronger indication that the page is gone forever) - check this article http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-explains-differences-404-410-status-codes-189060 - so a 410 is also a valable option. As most sites already have a custom 404 page I guess the 404 solution is the easiest one;

I forgot to mention in my first reply - but there is also a good article on out-of-stock products on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content

Dirk

Hi Sander

Redirecting based on ip address can be quite tricky. If you would redirect US visitors based on ip address to the US site rather than the corporate site you risk that you will redirect the main Googlebot (who is crawling your site with a Californian ip) to the US site as well. You could exclude the Google ip's from the redirection - but that would be against the Google Guidelines (check http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2008/06/how-google-defines-ip-delivery.html : "Googlebot should see the same content a typical user from the same IP address would see.")

You could consider to use the ip detection to show a message to US visitors - inviting them to visit the US site rather than the corporate one. This way you give the choice to the user - continue the visit on the corporate site or going to the dedicated US version (which is probably better in terms of usability as well - personally I always find it annoying when a site redirects me somewhere based on my location). For frequent visitors you could store their choice in a cookie & redirect them automatically if the cookie is set for this particular visitor)

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Egol,

You can mask the url of the CDN behind your own url - so rather than displaying d3vam04na8c92l.cloudfront.net/imagename.jpg (the example is Cloudfront but it's possible for most CDN's) it could be something like images.mysite.com/imagename.jpg - so links to these pages would still be beneficial to your domain rather than the cdn.

Dirk

Why don't you use the domain.com to serve a "choose language" page - store the choice in the cookie and for subsequent visits redirect to the chosen language. Example: http://www.volvocars.com. This is a pretty standard approach in Belgium to serve both Dutch/French content on the same domain.

rgds,

Dirk

In addition to Matt's reply - you state that you redirected the doorway pages type site.co.uk/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester - however if I try this with the url you provided it returns a 404 - rather than redirecting to branches/manchester-tool-hire-shop or /cleaning-equipment

Dirk

Don't forget that . & ? have a specific meaning within regex - if you want to use them for pattern matching you will have to escape them. Also be aware that not all bots are capable of interpreting regex in robots.txt - you might want to be more explicit on the user agent - only using regex for Google bot.

User-agent: Googlebot

#disallowing page.php and any parameters after it

disallow: /page.php

#but leaving anything that starts with par1=ABC

allow: page.php?par1=ABC

Dirk

To be very honest I don't think it will make a difference if it's going to the /us/ version rather than the root.

If you prefer - you could keep the us version on the root & only redirect the non-us visitors to a country version.

Dirk

No difference for SEO; main difference is the Green bar which is displayed for Extended SSL certifcates  - these are the ones which tend to be more expensive than the "standard" ones - on top of that they don't allow wildcards - so you'll need a certificate for each subdomain. Could increase confidence of your visitors in your site - but as stated before - no direct SEO impact.

Dirk

It doesn't really matter where you put the sitemap - as long as the search engines are able to find them.

You can indicate the location in Webmaster tools - or in the robots.txt file. (you need to validate each domain & subdomain in WMT).

Dirk

Hreflang will certainly help -however it's a bit confusing how you put in in your question. Hreflang is not put on domain but on page level:

Australian pages:

United States pages:

UK pages:

=> hreflang needs to be put on every page (you can test some sample pages here: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

Apart from hreflang - register each folder in WMT & target it to the specific country.
So set domain.com/uk/ to specifically target UK.

Apart from that - make sure you adapt the text to the "local" English (so UK english for uk...etc) & use proper currencies & provide local contact detailes. Build local links for each subfolder.

If you do this you should be fine

Dirk

One sitemap is ok from technical perspective (as long as it doesn't become to long =>50K URLs). For reporting it is interesting to split per country - this way it's easier in WMT to check if you have indexing problems on a specific country version.

Dirk

PS There is a typo in my initial answer for UK - the language has to be en-uk & not en-us

Oops - just noticed that I had an error in the first reply and didn't check the correct code. Mea culpa.

Hi Rob

Wanted to reply you on your previous question but than I noticed the new one. I have the impressions that your new site has compatibility issues with the different plugins you use.

I tried to check your site with different external tools (web-sniffer.net - first time 302 status but no details / webpagetest.org - check: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151013_3E_13EQ/ - failed & http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151013_1P_14V3/1/details/ - check the 302 in the first line ) - and results are not consistent. Apart from that - as mentioned previously - when checking your site in Firefox I can see the Analytics snippet in the source - when I try the same thing in Chrome the snippet is not present.

The cached version of your site (homepage) isn't complete - check http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_cThj8msp3EJ:www.advanced-driving.co.uk/+&cd=1&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=be#da-page_in_widget-4 - are you blocking some js/css files in your robots.txt

Try fetching pages like Google in WMT (and with the other tools) and check the results - you could try to enable/disable each module to see if results change.

Dirk

Hi Antonio,

Not sure which language you prefer - but you can find some sample codes here: https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/v3/samples - I tried the python example which was quite well documented inside the code, I guess it's the same for the other languages. If I have some time I could give it a try - but it won't be before the end of next week (and based on python)

Dirk

Hi Becky,

You are correct - normally if a tag is fired it won't be counted as bounce (unless you set "noninteraction=true" - check https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068#NonInteractionEvents)

Dirk

The answer from Joe is not really correct - I you do a "inspect element" it shows the code including the modifications from executed javascript.

"The DOM tree view shows the current state of the tree; it may not match the HTML that was originally loaded for different reasons. For example, you can modify the DOM tree using JavaScript; the browser engine can try to correct invalid author markup and produce an unexpected DOM."

Source: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/iterate/inspect-styles/basics#inspect-an-element

Google is able to understand javascript - so it will see the link and crawl. Tools like Screaming Frog and the Moz Crawler won't be able to crawl it.

Hope you know that without javascript - the only thing you see is a blank page. Personally I would rather try to degrade gracefully - meaning that visitors with no javascript enable would still be able to visit your site.

Dirk