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Hey MV -

What you say here I don't think is the correct way to be thinking about it:

"My thought would have been that the sub domain is only as good as the main domain and in this case the main domain isn't strong because little or no content is hosted on it."

As I said in my original comment, there isn't really a "main domain" with a technical implementation. Your subdomain should be able to rank just fine as long as it is the canonical, has links to it, and the migration was done correctly from the old to the new. I still suspect that there are a lot of links left to the old site setup that are not yet benefitting where your site is now.

A subdomain is a separate site from another subdomain, so site.domain.com is different from www.domain.com and has its own ranking potential. Links to www.domain.com may have a knockon effect for ranking site.domain.com, but you also need links to site.domain.com to really be able to rank.

Hi Rhys! Great question.

Just to be clear, you're talking about this scenario. You have page site.com/page/ and want to redirect it to site.com/page2/, but you also have children of /page/ that are /page/1/ and /page/2/.

You are wondering what happens when you redirect **just **/page/ to /page2/. Is that correct?

If you do a one-to-one redirect, no REGEX and no pattern matching, then /page/1/ and /page/2/ should remain where they are. You are not removing the /page/ subfolder, but are simply forwarding the /page/ URL to /page2/.

If you are also wanted to move /page/1/ to /page2/1/ and /page/2/ to /page2/2/, then you should be sure that those URLs resolve before you redirect the original URL. From a pure SEO point of view, moving all the pages is the right move to keep your URL architecture clean. Though if you are just moving /page/ to /page2/ in order to test things and are going to come back to /page/ eventually, then redirecting the sub pages is not really necessary right now.

Does that help? If you need to clarify more, please do and I can adjust my answer!

Hi -

The first three seem to make sense to me. If I were you, I would treat Property Listings like a Place. Place also has GeoCoordinates as an Itemprop, so you can mark up the location from within that Schema as well.

Depending on what kind of property it is, you could also use the Thing > Place > Residence Schema for certain parts. It's a bit more specific than Place.

Hope this helps a bit!

Hi there -

This is a pretty common setup for ecommerce sites with both content and products. Of course, I'd always recommend doing something like www.footballshirtcollective.com/store/ with your product URLs there, which would likely allow you to exclude advertisers/advertising from those pages.

If you do want to use the subdomain and are already committed to that, then there are definitely ways to make it work very well for SEO.

A subdomain is basically a separate website. You need to do everything for it that you would do for the www subdomain (www is technically a subdomain, after all), including but not limited to:

• Verify in Search Console
• Have GA set up
• Crawlable site structure
• Sitemaps
• Well-formatted URLs (lowercase, hyphens, etc)

Since you are moving the URLs from www to store., you also need to implement direct and correct 1:1 301 redirects from the www. to the store. URLs. DO NOT do a blanket redirect of all the current ecomm www URLs to the base of store.footballshirtcollective.com.

Hope that helps!

Self-promotion - if you're looking for help with migrating your content between platforms, I have people on Credo who can help you - https://www.getcredo.com/bizverticals/ecommerce-platform-migrations/

There's a lot of nuance to what is being said there. As others in the community have said, if you were going to test it out yourself on your own site and put your own income and business on the line, would you choose a 302 over a 301 without testing it?

We saw what happened to Wired as they were going HTTPS and used 302s - https://www.wired.com/2016/09/wired-completely-encrypted/

Google has also said, and some people have been able to test for different reasons, that if a 302 is left in place long enough then Google may start treating them like 301s and start passing link equity through a 302. But, that's a lot of ifs and uncertainties, at least way too many for me.

Hey Mike, that's all going to depend on which ecommerce shop you're using and if they are able to do a reverse proxy like that. Otherwise, subdomain is how you need to go.

Hey Kit -

This is a question I am seeing coming up a lot recently! I think you'd be well guided to either get in and do a deep analysis on your own site or hire someone to do one to get to the bottom of this. There have been a decent few people sharing some screenshots of Search Console (Barry rounded them up here) where some saw drops, others saw steady, and still others saw increases.

The results you see from AMP seem to heavily depend on the correct technical implementation (and Search Console shows you errors) as well as the type of SERP feature you are in (regular organic, carousel at the front or buried deep, etc).

Hope that's helpful.

John

Woof, this one is tough. It's definitely a legal minefield when you are dealing with sites like Yelp or Google. I don't know the ins-and-outs of all of those platforms and their specific rules around re-using reviews, but I'd bet that they wouldn't be happy about it.

If you have reviews somewhere (eg your own site) and want to use them on another site, I'd say that it's best practice to reach out to those people and see if they are ok with that. It's just good business and who knows - maybe they'll give you another unique one!

From a pure SEO point of view, it is technically "duplicate content" but that terms has been used so generally that I should explain myself. When we talk about "duplicate content" in the SEO space, it means one of two things:

• Massive issues on a site with URLs harming each other and keeping the site from ranking for head terms
• Content placed on other sites for the purposes of driving links back, with no canonical or link back to the original

While I am not a huge fan of replicating reviews, there are definitely business reasons for doing it. I don't really think about the "duplicate content" effects of duplicating reviews onto other platforms, as long as they're adding value.

Hope that helps somewhat.

Hi Nicola -

Great question here. As Malcolm said, ad networks do not pass link equity. However, a banner advertisement that is not part of an ad network is technically a paid link (unless it's an embeddable badge or something). Often these will have referrer numbers on them as well. I think that Google devalues these when they see the referral code, but that is not for sure.

But, to be safe, I would add the rel="nofollow" to these links.

Hey Darin -

Why is your markup at the bottom of the page (http://imgur.com/AXcyxWL) instead of where the stars actually are? You're essentially hiding the snippets on the page, hiding content, and I can't imagine Google likes that very much.

I'd work to get the markup where the actual stars and content are.

Here is my question - why are you thinking about doing this instead of building genuine linkable assets and building your brand online? This is SO easy to do for real estate, you just have to think a bit outside the box.

I wrote a post on ContentMarketingInstitute.com today about the types of content that real estate agents should create. Have a read - http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/07/4-types-of-content-for-realtors/

You should be looking to build genuine assets like this that is the kind of thing that Google wants to reward as opposed to trying to game the system, which at best will give you a short yet unsustainable boost, and at worst will penalize you. Why take the chance?

Blocking the links in .htaccess won't work, as that's not how Google crawls. If you have the webmaster information, you could maybe send a cease and desist order. I'd also submit a reinclusion request and show them the domains that are redirecting to your site and show them that you do not own these sites. I would also show them the drop that has occurred because of it.

Be totally transparent with the reinclusion team.

Hey Shauny -

I'm not seeing those directory links you're talking about in either OSE or Majestic. What I do see, though, is these links which appear to be from a link network (since all the links are the same) -

http://www.directorio.internet.com.pe/Top/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Manchester/Worsley http://www.smart-dir.com/dir/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Manchester/Worsley http://www.gosearchfor.com/directory/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Manchester/Worsley

I'd go and remove those links, if your rankings dropped.

In my opinion, right now directories are too risky for my clients and my own sites. The only ones that I would do are BetterBusinessBureau (in the US), DMOZ, and Yahoo directory. Other than that, I steer clear of them and have moved my clients away from them.

Hi Anuj -

I think you are operating from a very false assumption that is going to hurt your organic traffic (I suspect it has already).

The XML sitemap is one of the the very best ways to tell the search engines about new content on your website. Therefore, by not putting your new coupons in the sitemap, you are not giving the search engines one of the strongest signals possible that new content is there.

Of course, you have to automate your sitemap and have it update as often as possible. Depending on the size of your site and therefore the processing time, you could do it hourly, every 4 hours, something like that. If you need recommendations for automated sitemap tools, let me know. I should also point out that you should put the frequency that the URLs are updated (you should keep static URLs for even your coupons if possible). This will be a big win for you.

Finally, if you want to make sure your static pages are always indexed, or want to keep an eye on different types of coupons, you can create separate sitemaps under your main sitemap.xml and segment by type. So static-pages-sitemap.xml, type-1-sitemap.xml, etc. This way you can monitor indexation by type.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you need an audit or something like that. Sounds like there are some easy wins!

John

Does it work? Yeah, probably. For now.

Should it work? Probably not. I obviously haven't seen the sites, but if they're hosted on the same hosting account with the same IP address, then it wouldn't surprise me if this was eventually hit. And if it was reported, it definitely would not pass a manual review by the Google spam team IMO.

As others have said, it's super risky. Just a few weeks ago I didn't let someone join my platform to provide local SEO services specifically because they are doing this sort of thing as their main link acquisition tactic for their clients, and while it works right now it's definitely very grey hat and will stop working at some point. I've spoken with people who used to operate Personal Blog Networks like this, and they always get hit eventually.

I'd also hate to be the SEO brought in to clean this sort of thing up and get the clients that this company loses ranking again. Lots of small businesses sound like they'll be harmed because of this, unfortunately.

Hope that helps!

John

This is actually a really interesting question. I looked at their category pages (eg http://venturebeat.com/tag/ar-vr-weekly/) and those seem to be set up correctly to handle infinite scroll as it sends the search engines to the next page.

I've not come across this with infinite scroll on articles, though. I'm sure they've tested it extensively to figure out the best way to send search engines to future articles, but who really knows if it's being effective. If it's still there, I'd assume that they've seen positive signs but it is definitely a non-standard implementation of rel-next/prev!

This does bring up a good point about copying/not copying a competitor's strategy. They have this implemented, but would it work for your own site/business? Maybe, but maybe not. We can't be sure until we test it ourselves (or speak with someone at VentureBeat who wants to share their learnings :-)). If you know when it was rolled out you could benchmark there and look at SEMrush or another tool to see their organic visibility and from there draw at least some correlation, if not causation.

Thanks for flagging this up! It's cool to see.

Hey there -

Great question. If that's what's happening, then someone definitely bought the old domain with links to it and redirected it. I've also seen this done TO people in order to pass an algorithmic penalty onto a competitor. Nasty stuff.

That said, while this isn't strictly whitehat, it can be super effective to buy old dead domains with links and redirect them into your own site. It actually works very well for SEO purposes! But, it comes with its risks as you have to do a lot of due diligence on the domain you want to redirect as there could have been some dodgy things going on and you don't want to risk passing along a penalty to your own site.

That said, I wouldn't undo the redirect unless you think it's hurting you. Move on and focus on other things to build new links.

The better thing to do, IMO, is to find these dead sites and pull their backlink profiles, then go and do outreach offering your site as a replacement for that site that is now dead. It's called broken link building and it works really well!

Hope that helps.

John

Hi Sno!

Great question here. International SEO can definitely be a tricky beast! And I'll definitely take you up on that free dogsled ride in Lapland if I can help you

Some questions for you:

1. .se is Sweden, yes? And Lapland is in Finland, right? Is your domain targeted just towards Sweden in Search Console (assuming you have that set up) or is there no international targeting set? Though from looking at your page you're in Kiruna, Sweden, so this shouldn't be an issue.
2. The page is cached, but I see that it hasn't been recached (or potentially even crawled) since Dec 26, 2016. Link to cache.
3. How long has this site been live? I am not seeing any external links to it. You're not up against any hugely formidable competitors, but they do have more links than you. So work on that!

By the way, I did a search for your term and see you ranking #74 in Google.com. So yeah, build some links and get that ranking up!

John

Hey there -

What a great question! It's definitely a very involved one and not a decision to be taken lightly. In fact, I was just having a similar conversation with a group of people recently when one of them posed it as well.

First of all, let me make a few comments around Domain Authority and how you should be thinking about it. Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz that correlates to how likely a website is to rank. That said, it's still unclear how the search engines are treating subdomains as they can be on different servers, be completely different technologies, and targeted to different countries as you well know.

That said, I am always a fan of consolidating link equity. If you move from a ccTLD to a country-specific subdomain and do all of the permanent redirects correctly, two things will likely happen:

1. You will consolidate link equity from many different domains to your one overall domain, which should help with rankings/traffic
2. You can consolidate your brand, which may help with conversions.

That said, you need to do your customer research and see if they'll trust eg france.site.com as much as they trust site.fr. There are definitely ways to make country-specific subdomains work very well for SEO, but this migration should not be done solely for SEO reasons in my opinion.

Hope that helps.

John

Take it on a site by site basis. Most of these sites have nofollowed all self-created links because of spammers and people trying to use the platform for link building. Shoot, I just did that on my own site

I completely agree with Linda about exposure and referral traffic. If it's a targeted audience, you can definitely drive a lot of traffic from these sorts of sites. I've seen some sites where if you get mentioned, it can literally drive thousands of visits per month to your site.