Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You are most welcome! Best of luck!

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

Hey Ricky -

Great question that I think a lot of small businesses and companies deal with. While on the one hand Google's guidelines say "Do not ever pay for a link", that gets really fuzzy in instances like local business bureaus (where you pay a membership fee and happen to get a link on their site), scholarships (where you're giving money and happen to get a link), and a lot more. Even the old Yahoo directory (retired in 2014 or so) was $300 a year and was followed and everyone had it. So the question is a lot more nuanced than "should I or shouldn't I?"

In this case, I would shy away from this specific instance simply because of the following:

• They are actually advertising different types of links depending on what you pay. They also don't say where the additional links for the higher price will go.
• They're willing to link deep for more money. This is a red flag.
• Their WHOis info is private. Not a good sign for an above-the-board company.
• They have another directory on this same IP. If that one got hit, so would this one.
• They may have a DA of 56, but if you look at their links they're (almost) all comment links that were likely built with an automated tool.

All of these are red flags to me. The fact that it is topically relevant to your site is a good thing, but in my opinion the bad definitely outweighs the good.

Spend your money creating things and then outreaching them to get the links that will actually build your business.

John

Hi Jay! Great question here.

First of all, kudos to you for looking to kill duplicate content with fire. As a marketer but foremost a writer, I am all about great writing and not doing this duplicated/spun stuff to try to rank. It won't convert anyways.

I put out a call to my followers on Twitter and one of them recommended https://www.killduplicate.com/en. I haven't personally used it, but give it a shot! It comes highly recommended.

Hope that's helpful!

John

Agreed. If you can make them awesome, then roll them out slower and do a lot of promotion around each. You'll get more bang for your buck.

Hey there -

Definitely a super valid question. I would also question why you'd keep some of the content that is, in your words, "content on similar topics distributed across both posts and pages." If they're competing with each other for rankings, you should be looking to combine some of them. You may already be doing that, in which case good work!

To your direct question. I wouldn't recommend writing custom code to make the Posts work as Pages. It's actually pretty tough to make this work within WordPress, and if you want them all to have site.com/(category)/(url-slug)/ as their URL, you'd be best served to use either a Page or a Post, but not try to combine the two. This will also make future management of all the content a lot easier as you won't have content all over the place.

I hope this is helpful!

Hey Woolbert -

Definitely something you need to solve. If this keeps up, your site may be either marked in the SERPs as having potentially malicious code or even worse they may show a layover from the SERPs warning people, thus driving them away from your site.

You need to clean up your site. First, remove the offending files. Then contact Google to let them know what you've done. Then implement stricter controls for what can be uploaded or not. Without knowing your site, it's impossible to know how feasible this is, but it's what you need to do.

And finally, make sure your site is running HTTPS.

Good luck.

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.

Hey there! Great question and sounds like you are thinking through the important things.

I think the canonical approach is best, especially if URLs and content are staying the same. I would not mess around with robots.txt or noindex at this point as the canonical should keep the one out of the index and allow the other to rank.

Longterm of course, a proper 301 redirect strategy is the right solution. But short term, to test user behavior/conversions/rankings, a canonical is a great way to go.

Came to say just this. Great answer, Anthony.

Hi there! Great question and one that has perplexed SEOs for years.

You are indeed right that one of the best ways to rank the page over the PDF is to put some of the PDF content on your page and do other best SEO practices (eg build links to the page, have a better optimized title/etc than the PDF itself). It is also possible to put the rel-canonical in the header of the PDF - https://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

Finally, if you don't want your actual PDF showing up in the search results, consider a) blocking it in the robots.txt and then b) requesting the URL be removed from the search index via Search Console.

Good luck!

Hey Shirley -

Thanks for the question! Short answer is no - the information does not have to be different. What should happen with a canonical is that the search engines will see the canonical and apply the ranking for Page A to Page B.

However, the search engines do tell us that a canonical is a suggestion and that they do not always respect it if they think it was either a) done in error or b) is being done to manipulate. So, assuming Page B really is a duplicate of or a better version of Page A, yet you want to keep Page A around for some reason (PPC landing page or other), then the meta info will likely be similar anyways.

Finally, if you are canonicalling Page A to Page B, make sure that Page A is not in your XML sitemaps!

Good luck!

John

Hi Daniel! Thanks for your question.

It's kind of hard to know what's going on without seeing your site. Feel free to PM it to me.

There's definitely a chance that this is the case, but if it's happening with Yoast it is likely a configuration issue on your site not with Yoast's technology. You may need to adjust your tag permalinks within your WordPress admin so that the URLs are correct in your sitemaps.

John

Hey Rhys, it does indeed and you should be totally fine technically. Though I'd still recommend redirecting the one without subpages from a pure SEO point of view.

And of course, test it on a test server first to make sure there are no other unforeseen issues!

Hi Rhys! Yes, that should be fine as long as you do a one-to-one redirect from /page/ to /page2/.

Out of curiosity, why change the URL and not update the content and styles on the current page? You'd save any link equity, keep your URLs consistent, and probably stand a better chance of ranking longterm.

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!

While I agree with EGOL, I'd also do two more things:

1. Check to see if the same issue happens when going to the organization's site when you are at home or somewhere other than work. It could also be an issue because of your office's security settings.
2. Regarding if Google will penalize you, no. If it's a paid listing (eg you're getting listing only because you paid) then it's a bit more of a grey area, but it's also a legit association and so I wouldn't worry about it to be honest. If you are worried about it, then you could always ask for it to be nofollowed. But as I said, I think this is a case where a followed link is totally fine and no search quality reviewer would bat an eye at it.

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.

Absolutely no harm at all.  Do you have an index sitemap that you list all the sub-sitemaps from? If not you should do that as well just for sanity of sitemap management.

Hi there! Good question.

First, each individual XML sitemap should only have a maximum of 50k URLs in it. At the scale of millions of pages I always recommend splitting out your sitemaps by type so that you can monitor indexation by section of the site.

If I were you I'd create a separate sitemap for landing pages and exclude the PPC landing pages unless those are the same pages you've created for SEO.

Cheers!