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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,

Don't think that there is a plugin for this (most people need it the other way round).If you have access to htaccess you could add a rewrite rule which is redirecting all https request to http - see https://sites.google.com/site/onlyvalidation/page/301-redirect-https-to-http-on-apache-server.

Options +FollowSymlinks 
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The other option would be to check if you can optimise the https to render faster - you could check this article (especially the part on SPDY): https://yoast.com/move-website-https-ssl/

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

While these links may not be visible on the page itself - they do exist in the HTML.

Just take a look at the source code of your homepage & search for the word 'compare' and you'll find links like this:

• class="separator">|<a <span="" class="html-tag">href</a><a <span="" class="html-tag">="</a>http://www.stopwobble.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/98500/uenc/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zdG9wd29iYmxlLmNvbS8,/form_key/Vw93RYTNzbI4GGns/" class="link-compare">Add to Compare

which will be followed by bots.

You could put a "nofollow" on these links (probably the easiest solution), block /product_compare using robots.txt - or use javascript to insert the links only when users are logged in.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

It's coming from the links in your footer - I attached a screen copy. (the copy is made on http://www.justkeyrings.co.uk/sitemap/ )

Not sure what you're doing wrong - the "bad" link is not always appearing (and it appears with both js enabled/disabled - caching enabled/disabled).

It certainly would not hurt to clean your HTML code a bit - it's should not necessarily pass the W3C validator, but adding basic things like a doc type declaration wouldn't hurt (http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/doctype.html). It helps the browser to better render your page, I am however not sure that this will help for this specific problem)

Hope this helps a bit with your search.

Dirk

iEMYQLv

Seems to be solved already? I tried the url in two different browsers & checked with web-sniffer.net - I get the correct url.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

It's quite simple - just go to https://moz.com/subscriptions/cancel

(you can also go via the navigation - click on your avatar (upper right corner - select "Billing & Subscription") - on the next page click "Cancel" on your current plan)

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

Check the answer of Cyrus Shepard on this question: http://moz.com/community/q/are-cdn-s-good-or-bad-for-seo-edmonton-web - I fear it will be hard to find other quantified data.

"We've done a lot of studies here at Moz and what we've found is this:

• There does seem to be a slight correlation between site speed and rankings (keep in mind that correlation is not causation)
• Our studies have not found a relationship between CDNs and higher rankings.

So the evidence would seem to suggest that CDNs can help your website speed, and it's possible to help your rankings, simply using a CDN by itself is no guarantee."

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

If these files are used to render the content on screen - it's not a good idea to block these files from indexing.

Official Google recommendation is to allow these files to be indexed:
"If resources like JavaScript or CSS in separate files are blocked (say, with robots.txt) so that Googlebot can’t retrieve them, our indexing systems won’t be able to see your site like an average user. We recommend allowing Googlebot to retrieve JavaScript and CSS so that  your content can be indexed better.  "

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html

Rgds,

Dirk

Technically this should be possible - you might want to check this article - http://forums.iis.net/t/1178655.aspx (the best answer is at the bottom of the page) - but maybe the other links provided in the answers can be useful as well

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Andrew,

Your canonical needs to exist - so for the page you mentioned you need to update the url to the one with the trailing slash. In fact - for all pages on your site you should check if the canonical exist (Screaming Frog can do miracles here)

The issue with the https is a bit different - you should not have both versions (http/https in parallel) - so if your https certificate is ok you should put your site in https & redirect the http version to https

This can be done by adding these lines to your htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

If you switch to https - you must make sure that all the resources you call on a page are also on HTTPS - if not, users could get a security warning. There is an article on how to migrate site to HTTPS on Yoast: https://yoast.com/move-website-https-ssl/

If your site is on https - your canonicals need to be in https as well. A tool like Screaming Frog can help you to check that both (https & canonicals are ok) - it's not free - but certainly worth the investment.

Hope this helps - don't hesitate to ask if it's not clear

Dirk

I didn't check all the references of Patrick - but yes, the way you build your url (folders or "flat") will have no impact on how you are positioned in the SERP's (if they contain the same keywords)- so both of the options you mentioned in your original question are equal if you only see it from SEO perspective.

rgds

Dirk

Hi Marie

Couldn't resist to like this - I noticed that you were only missing one like to reach the Moz Walhalla...

Congrats,

Dirk

The resources mentioned  by Patrick are all good ones - I am even going to add one: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/ . You don't even have to read it :

• structured url's help semantics  - the folder like structure helps search engines understand how the site is structured
• it's easier to check which pages are indexed as you can do a site:mysite.com/folder/
• reporting is way easier with a structured url

Apart from that, and probably most important argument: a site depth is measured on how many clicks you need to get to a page and how pages are cross-linked - Google is not counting the number of "/" in your url's to determine if your site is flat or not.

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

Far from being an htacess expert, but you could also try this rule:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]

(off course I didn't invent it myself - it's coming from here: https://github.com/phanan/htaccess#force-trailing-slash )

I tried it here http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/ - and it seems to work if url is in the form
mydomain.com/article => mydomain.com/article/

If you check with mydomain.com/article.htm - it's not redirected

Could be an alternative if the rule proposed by Andy wouldn't work.

Rgds,

Dirk

Hi Pete,

Personally I am not a big believer in trying to funnel link juice across the site - but theoretically yes, if you reduce the number of (unique) links on the home, the more link juice is passed to the categories below.

On the other side, the fewer links you have on the homepage, the more you are pushing content deeper in your site (number of clicks from the homepage to reach pages).

The other point - you can structure your URL anyway you want (best is to keep them quite simple so that they are easy to remember and not too long). For the depth - Google is looking at the number of clicks to reach this page (starting from home) - they are not counting the number of "/" in your url.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Edit: you might want to check these resources: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2316757/matt-cutts-on-linking-guidelines-how-many-links-on-a-page - and this one https://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Hi Andrew,

You use the Yoast e-commerce plugin - and I assume at some point you defined a canonical url for the page you mentioned.
In short - with a canonical url you ask Google not to index this page: https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=41 but the url that you have put as canonical url which is this page: https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum

In order to respect this request - this url need to exist on your site. However - this url is redirected to https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/ with a 301 redirect (basically stating: hey, this url doesn't exist anymore on this location, but you can find it here).

So, if you update the canonical url from https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum to https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/ your problem is solved.

There is no need to redirect https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=41  to https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/ as the canonical is already taking care of the duplicate content.

More background info on canonical url's can be found here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

Hope this clarifies, if not, let me know,

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Pete,

No need to worry about the duplicate links - to quote Matt Cutts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ)  - nothing to worry about (as long as it's not 5000 internal links with over optimised anchor)

266 links on the home is a lot - but not an amount of links that is surprisingly high for an average e-commerce site (especially with the duplicates). Regarding the number of links I would rather think about usability than SEO. If having this much links on the page is making it easier for your visitors to go through your site - keep them. If this number of links is making them confused - try to reorganise & regroup the links. A small user test with a few people not too familiar with your site can learn you a lot about the usability factor and how many people are actually using the links to navigate (vs just using the internal search function)

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Thanks for the compliment Egol!

Hi Patrick,

Your method is a good one - I use more or less the same trick to retrieve url's from a sitemap in xls  (it's even faster if you sort the url's in alphabetical order & delete the rows containing priority / lastmod /.. - then you only need to do a find/replace on the <loc>/</loc> )

It's just in this specific case as the sitemap was generated in Screaming Frog that it's easier to eliminate these redirected url's upfront.

Dirk

Hi Justin

The how-to of Patrick is correct - but as you are generating your sitemap using Screaming Frog there is really no need to go through this manual processing.

If you only need to create the sitemap:

Go to Configuration > Spider -
Tab: Basic settings: uncheck everything apart from "Crawl Canonicals" (unchecking Images/CSS/JS/External links is not strictly necessary but speeds up the crawl)

Advanced: Check "Always Follow redirects" / "Respect Noindex" / "Respect Canonical"

After the crawl - generate the sitemap - it will now only contain the "final" url's - after the redirects.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

PS Try to avoid internal links which are redirected - better to replace these links by links to the final destination