Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Got it, thanks so much Ian!

Hi ian, for those of us interested can you share the issues that are causing this update to be rolled back? Also, I like many saw the update and have to explain things to clients and bosses, so it would Ben rest to get a post on the main blog about what’s changing and why things are fluctuating more than usual.

I totally agree with you that affiliate links should not help rankings and many mention that they should always be nofollowed, though a lot of people don't (I probably have some followed affiliate links out there somewhere on the Internet).

Philosophically I am opposed to affiliate links helping the target site rank. I've also seen some sites get into trouble for having affiliates link with followed links, so I'd be careful of it myself if i was running an affiliate program.

Well, they are already starting to put ads in there so I expect this to go fully paid eventually. But that said, I don't see the idea of GMB going anywhere soon, but we have seen how they change things all the time and they could possibly rename it while only changing a few things.

Branding has never been Google's strong suit. Just look at their maze of chat apps.

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.

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.

Hi there. Good question and one that comes up a lot.

You need to do the following:

• Put the noindex on those pages
• Remove the block in robots.txt
• Monitor these pages falling out of the index
• Once they are all out, then put the block back in place

You both want them to a) drop out and b) then not be crawled, so the above will take care of that for you.

Hope that helps!

John

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/

Hi there, I'd recommend looking into using Scripted for this if you're not a strong writer. You can get awesome content for quite cheap.

One outstanding question for me is if you see fewer pages/visit when someone lands on your homepage than when they land on a deeper page? Is your brand big enough to be able to track branded searches/visits?

Hey John -

Thanks for coming here and asking your question. From my looks at your site as well, I don't see anything glaring that would keep that page from ranking.

Unfortunately, sometimes Google picks a random page to rank (on small sites like yours this is often the strongest on the site, which is the homepage) and seems unwilling to want to change that ranking page. A few thoughts for you on how to get the correct page ranking:

• Rewrite your content on this page. It is stuffed with keywords (your main keyword appears 10 times, "Jekyll Island" appears 30) and doesn't read naturally. You're writing for 2007-era search crawlers, not 2017-era users.
• Your site is way over-optimized. When I look at your About or Portfolio pages, why are these optimized for specific [wedding photographer] keywords? This doesn't make any sense for users.
• Build links to the page you want to rank. Get some local citations (from Better Business Bureaus, wedding venues, etc) to this page and I bet you'll pop in your rankings.
• Mention different venues where you have shot weddings in that area. This will help give semantic relevance to your page.

Hope that helps.

Hey Vahid -

A few questions for you:

1. Have you seen a drop in traffic to either?
2. When you search the brand name in Google, does the correct title appear?

The site: command is notoriously misleading a lot of the time, so much so that some Googlers have hinted that it might be going away. I also don't read your language so I can't really investigate too much further other than looking at canonicals and such and they all seem correct.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you have the same content on both, then you should look into making that unique to each site, and maybe change the page title on the wrong one to see if that helps.

Hi Anna!

Did you do any other site architecture or design changes to your homepage? Sounds like overall your site is performing better (though not as quickly as the year before) with the changes but your homepage had something changed that would have affected this.

That, or if they are unique visitors then you may have lost some key rankings or a key traffic referral source. Or, quite simply, this isn't connected with the redesign and your marketing was less effective in the past year possibly because your resources internally were going towards the redesign.

Have you dug deeper into different traffic and referral sources to see if this could have led to it?

Yeah it's super strange. I've not seen it happen before, but these sorts of anomalies pop up from time to time. As long as you haven't seen a drop in traffic or conversions, I honestly wouldn't worry about it beyond doing what you've been doing and trying to build your brand by building links to your .com site, which is resolving properly.

Please let us know how it all turns out!

Hi there -

Very strange situation! I took a look and see that your site redirects correctly (just one hop to your new site), the canonical is set correctly, etc. But I see aptitus.pe ranking in your home country search engine.

Looking at other places online, your .com is linked from your Google Maps entry and other main places where this sort of thing can cause issues.

To me, the next step would be to:

• Reach out to some of these sites (OSE link) to ask them to update their link to the .com
• Double check your .pe robots.txt and htaccess to make sure they are functioning correctly (sometimes stuff changes and we're not aware of it)

I'd be careful of taking your old site out of the index manually, because it should happen automatically with the 301s especially since your redirects have been in place for so long. Maybe try to Fetch as Googlebot the old homepage so that Google sees it and maybe then they'll respect the 301.

Hope that helps. Please report back.

John

Hi Ricardo -

I definitely agree with Donna's answer about whether it is a good strategy or not (yes, these additional links to new pages can definitely help) from a pure link acquisition perspective. I would, though, encourage you to think of it beyond just the links that you are receiving.

Think about it as an ongoing relationship and a way to continually get in front of their audience. Build your name there (and get whatever referral traffic and links you can), then use that to get columns on bigger publications that have more traffic. I know of quite a few agencies/businesses that have built their client roster or customer list off the back of consistent content marketing like this.

It's the deep not wide content strategy, and IMO works best long term.

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

Hi AdvertisingCloud -

Thanks for your question. It's definitely one that gets asked pretty often.

Honestly, you should do what is right for the user. Do you have multiple of the keyword (eg widgets) and not just one (eg widget)? If so, use the multiple because it's what the user who is looking for multiples will want to see. If the latter, use the singular.

If you're really concerned about losing rankings, build more good links. That'll help out across the board with your rankings.

Hope that helps!

John

Hi Pamela! Great question here. I dealt with something similar a few years ago with an ecommerce client.

I love that your client is thinking about consolidating all of the products under one brand. From a pure branding perspective, and also ease of updating and lowering technical overhead, this definitely makes sense. Right now they're spread across a bunch of sites and there is likely no cohesive brand. And if you're doing good SEO and thus content marketing and building links, you are dividing your effort by 4 or he is paying 4x what he needs to in order to have his business where he wants it to be.

It's also an interesting question to me because of this - even if you ranked 1-4 for all 4 of his sites (which is honestly unrealistic), would he be making more money than having one site where all the attention is focused to convert as many people as possible? I have to believe that having one site is best, though you'll need to honestly do the math on how much traffic all of the sites are getting and if you can honestly get that same amount on just 1 site.

If you are going to consolidate them, your option B is the one I would go with. Redirect sites B, C, & D into site A, making sure you are doing 1:1 301 redirects. I don't see this as being spammy at all to be completely honest with you - your client owns all 4 sites and it consolidating them. It may take some time for the search engines to honor all of the 301s, but this feels like exactly the use case a 301 is meant for.

Hope that helps.

John

I love this question, Adriaan. It's one that a lot of people have asked over the years and that a lot of people have had to deal with over time especially with ecommerce sites like those you work on.

As you well know, there are multiple ways to handle duplicate content:

1. The way you are proposing, which is moving to a static URL structure that always keeps the same order
2. A web of canonicals like you seem to have set up (and it sounds like you have it set up correctly)
3. The whack-a-mole approach of periodically looking for duplicate content and implementing redirects, which can lead to further issues with internal redirects. This is not a good scalable option.

SEO is all about processes. If you have a canonical process that is working for you and has been scalable (eg you are not manually specifying the URL for each new category created, which is probably done when the merchandising team or feeds update the site), that works to a certain extent.

However, this is like treating a bunch of cuts on your hands with bandaids but not dealing with the fact that a) you only have so much space on your hands and can only apply so many bandaids, and b) that you're still getting cuts on your hands.

I prefer to deal with the root of the issue, which in your case is that you can have multiple URLs targeting the same terms based on the user's (or Googlebot's!) crawl path on your site. I am assuming that you are only putting the canonicals in your XML and HTML sitemaps, by the way?

If I were you, this is how I would tackle your problem:

1. Make sure you are only putting in the canonical URLs to your XML sitemaps. Start here.

2. Do a full crawl of your site and pull all the URLs that are canonicaling elsewhere. Then get your log files and see how much time the search engines are spending on these canonical'd URLs.

3. Also check to see that Google is indeed respecting all of your canonicals! At this scale of canonicals, I'd expect that they are semi-often not respecting them and you are still dealing with duplicate content issues. But again, that's just a hunch I have.

4. Make a decision from there, off of discussions with your engineers/designers/etc about how much work is involved, about if you think it's worthwhile to make the change.

I am **always **a fan of eliminating pages that are canonical'd and not serving a purpose (example: a PPC landing page might be canonical'd and noindexed, and you don't want to remove that page). My suspicion in your case, as well, is that having /brand/mens won't convert any differently from /mens/brand.

At the end of the day, you need to decide how you want your site organized and if your customers (the people buying things on the site) prefer to shop by brand or by gender/sport/whatever. This will help you decide what way to architect your URLs and your site's flow.

Hope that helps!

John