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This is likely to be Google's auditing system (from within Google Search Console) errors and is (probably) not your fault. If pages which are redirecting are being flagged as having duplicate Meta descriptions, that is demonstrably and necessarily factually inaccurate. A page which redirects somewhere else **never serves its source code **to Google, users or anyone else (assuming that the redirect is global, of course). If the source code is never seen, Google should not be able to find any Meta description let alone a duplicate one.

In all likelihood Google is comparing the new URLs against cached versions of the old pages (instead of re-visiting the old addresses as live URLs like it should do). As such it believes there's duplicate Meta data. When it eventually bothers to _actually _re-crawl the old URLs - it will eventually work out its issues and fix itself. If you want to speed it along, Fetch and render the old URLs so that Google knows they are actually redirecting now. Following that, spam the 'mark as fixed' thing until it complies with your work.

If however you are exempting Google from those particular redirects (maybe via the Googlebot user-agent), then obviously it can't see the redirects and is still accessing the old page-versions. Make sure that Google follows 301 redirects in the same way that users are forced to.

Be sure to test the redirects manually using something like this chrome extension. Test that the redirects work. Set your user-agent to Googlebot, do a hard refresh to clear your cache - try the page again. Try using a VPN to access the redirects from servers in different locations (try the UK, somewhere in Europe, the USA). Sometimes redirects are 'conditional' and if Google is somehow slipping through the net, that's a problem for you. Never just accept "well someone told me it was coded like this so it must always apply". Test manually, work out the real truth

Hope that helps!

That's a really good idea! Cut down what you have to manage to the essentials and then spend more time on those pages. Make sure you do some kind of ranking or traffic audit against all the pages though. You don't want to delete the versions of each page which have some (even if it is small) SEO power. You want to target the ones which Google isn't using

Sure, no problem I'll take a look now!

So **this is your post URL: **<a>https://www.hackerearth.com/recruit/resources/e-books/a-complete-guide-to-talent-assessment-software/</a>

This time Moz Link Explorer has only detected one backlink to the post.

The link is from: https://www.yasteq.com/US/Fremont/123161387835128/HackerEarth

The site describes itself thusly: "One of the largest resources on the Internet for finding computer & electronics services and related businesses, worldwide." - so basically it's a local-themed business directory with a tech focus and content curation elements. You can tell that more easily by looking at the homepage (https://www.yasteq.com/). It only has 18 domain authority so that's pretty weak to be honest. The listing is relevant with a reasonable write-up - but it's from a place no one really cares about.

Majestic SEO (another tool) found this link: https://www.eventshigh.com/detail/Bangalore/48e3b2743f568bd46a83bb182fe91ce8-djangothon?src=ecbox whilst **Ahrefs found a separate link from the same site here: **https://www.eventshigh.com/detail/bangalore/63c53417b3eadb328fa3d568d970624c-travel-tech-meetup-with-goibibo

At a glance these just seem to be simple events listings. In most instances, links from these listings are either image-based or have no-follow set to true. Contrary to popular opinion, 'no-following' links does not prevent or discourage users or search engines from following a link (probably one of the worst named attribute values ever). What it does is it prevents Google from transferring any link equity (or 'SEO juice') through the link. The linking page (which hosts the hyperlink) will still lose some SEO authority, but at the receiving end you won't be gaining any (it just gets vented into cyberspace).

Seeing as the page hosting a hyperlink loses SEO equity either way (a measure taken by Google to stop PageRank sculpting from actually 'being a thing') - the only reason to no-follow hyperlinks these days is to avoid outbound Penguin penalties. This is where you are selling hyperlinks but want to tell Google "this link is somehow commercial or advertorial in nature, so don't weight it into your SEO ranking algorithm(s) for Google's results". Google will take that on board and it will prevent the link-host from garnering a penalty (for selling links to others with the intention of manipulating rankings, kind of like being labelled a drug dealer)

The domain actually has very strong metrics in Ahrefs, earning an Ahrefs domain rating of 70. They are probably aware of their site's SEO-clout and either don't want to be giving you a free ride (they expect you to pay for the equity) or they're very cautious about how they link, not wanting to lose the established authority they have built up via penalty / manual action. In any case, though the site is strong and you have links from it - those links are not sending you much / any SEO equity - so there's no party here amigo. Image-based links tend to transfer less equity anyway (even forgetting about 'nofollow') and they have no (user-visible) anchor-text to explain their relevance. Search engines do use image links as signals, but they're not such strong signals (as they're more ambiguous in general)

Ahrefs also found two links from "Mail Pug":

• https://mailpug.com/?p=454
• https://mailpug.com/?paged=2&m=201808

Both have a Domain Rating and URL Rating of zero in Ahrefs. Content doesn't actually seem that bad but... it's from a site with no equity to give you.

In basic terms, your really decent contextual (content-based) links are from sites no one cares about. On the one site with high metrics, they're refusing to transfer SEO equity to you for one reason or another. As such, no rankings for this post.

The reason why it's not ranking well is that although it may be detailed and well written, unlike your other post it didn't attract links. As such it's not deemed very shareable and it has very little SEO authority. You might say it's a vehicle with no fuel.

The reasons why it attracted no 'significant' buzz or attention online could be variable. Was it promoted as well as the other post? Like you suggest - were there CRO or UX defects in the design or copy of the content? I'll leave that side to you.

Absolutely not a problem

Ah the bane that is parameter variant URLs. Mostly duplicate, tiny differences - Google doesn't usually like them (there are exceptions, but here it's clear that there's a genuine / flagged problem).

No-index / robots.txt are a bit over-the-top for this kind of stuff in my opinion. Obviously you can't use redirects to consolidate as in this situation that would prevent users from accessing the stated form variants (not cool).

You have two sensible options:

1) Canonical (using canonical tags) the parameter hooked forms to their non-parameter based ("pricing") parent (https://www.eginnovations.com/product/pricing)

2) Canonical the less used form variants to the one which is most often used (e.g: all parameter form variants to https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=perpetual - which is stated to be the 'popular' option) - and let them all sit separately to the parent (which contains no forms, this page: https://www.eginnovations.com/product/pricing).

My preference would be to try option 2 so Google at least has a chance of indexing the pricing URL _and _the most popular form variant. If you **still get duplication notices **then go nuclear and slam option 1 down.

When you put a canonical tag on a page referencing another URL as the canonical version, the active page (the one with the canonical tag on it) becomes non-canonical and is usually de-indexed by default. So no need for crazy robots or no-index Meta shenanigans.

Hope that helps!

What a niche, interesting question!

You could mean two things here, an on-page snippet that describes the product - or the Meta description which is strictly machine-read and which is used in Google's results (though not as a ranking factor! I'll get to this in a minute)

If you mean an on-page description, having duplicate snippets (so long as they are very small) with one changed word or term is not, by itself in isolation - likely to Garner a Google Panda penalty or algorithmic devaluation. If however the description is really the only unique element on the page, you may be at some small to moderate risk of that. But here's the thing - SEO is a competitive environment. Just because you don't get a penalty for not doing the best thing - does that mean you shouldn't do it? If one of your competitors is supplying more in-depth, better, more unique (value-add) information then they will outrank you (so long as their popularity / authority and trust metrics are similar to your own). Small comfort will it be, that you have no penalty - if your results for product URLs suck. Will it matter to you why you aren't getting traffic? Probably not - the commercial outcome could be the same

If you mean the Meta description, it probably won't matter very much at all - but let me lay some knowledge on you. Just because Meta descriptions have no special place in Google's ranking algorithm(s) that doesn't mean they can't benefit your SEO. But how can that be!? OK - so it's known that Meta descriptions (well written ones) have an elevated chance of forming SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) snippets in Google's results. If your ranking position contains text which does a better job of compelling a Google user to click through to your website, it stands to reason that writing decent Meta descriptions can make your existing ranking positions supply more traffic and work harder for you (without even shifting). Neat huh? The key of course is that Meta descriptions should be written from a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) perspective and not from a keyword / SEO perspective.

So - now you know. Do your best to compete and elevate yourself above others by supplying deeper, value-add (for end users) content on-page. In terms of Meta, CRO makes traffic flow!

Hope this was helpful

Ah man I love stuff like this!

Ok so here's your post: https://www.hackerearth.com/blog/artificial-intelligence/artificial-intelligence-101-how-to-get-started/

Now I can see you think this post only has four inbound links and you have drawn that conclusion from Moz Link Explorer. By the way I think Moz's tool is great. My agency wouldn't have a subscription otherwise! BUT - MLE (Moz Link Explorer) doesn't have a complete picture of all links on the web. Even Google doesn't have this (yet - their MO is to 'index the web' though).

There are several platforms which aim to supply 'backlink' (external links) data. Moz is one platform but there are others. All of these platforms or link-explorer tools, are coded to crawl the web in different ways. They all have their own unique philosophy on how to index the the 'important' links on the web more quickly. I'm not going to get into whether certain tools are better or worse, really you need **a few of them **so that you can aggregate and de-dupe your own data!

From Moz we can see that these URLs are linking to your post:

• http://blog.crescenttechnologyconsultants.com/artificial-intelligence-101-how-to-get-started/
• https://blog.steppingblocks.com/the-tools-that-saved-me-thousands
• http://analyticstraining.com/the-best-way-to-learn-ai-and-ml/
• https://analyticstraining.com/the-best-way-to-learn-ai-and-ml/

Really that's only three pages as the last two entries there are the same page being served via different protocols (HTTP vs HTTPS).

What do other tools have to say about your post?

Well I can tell you that another tools (Ahrefs) claims to have found more live links for this particular URL. That's not to say that it always will find more links overall, but in this instance it has.

Ahrefs believes that you have 10 live links (more than 4) from 8 domains.

I'll list the domains for your reference:

• refind.com
• steppingblocks.com
• analyticstraining.com
• innovify.com
• snyxius.com
• techgenies.com
• grokbase.com
• malware.xyz

In particular "refind.com" and "grokbase.com" have pretty high SEO authority metrics! These two were not picked up by MLE but will invariably have been factored by Google.

This is the link from "refind.com": https://refind.com/TinaTran_au/collections/ai - it looks pretty weird! If you go to the base-level homepage (https://refind.com/) you can see that the site is an effective content curation network with social aspects. It's likely that when your post was added by users or editors; at some point it featured on the homepage. If so that would have driven a pretty hefty whack of SEO-juice to your post. It may be worth uncovering how this network operates and seeing if you can get in with them, leverage the platform further. Turn fluke into process...

Here's the link from GrokBase: https://grokbase.com/t/gg/django-users/13a438tgw5/inconsistency-in-model-field-with-file-storage-on-amazon-s3 - seems a bit more 'on-point'. But what the heck is GrockBase? Let's go back to the home URL (https://grokbase.com/). Here's what they have to say about themselves: "Grokbase is a growing mailing list archive that facilitates __discovery of discussions and users within and across groups." - it doesn't mean huge amounts to me, maybe it will mean more to you. What ever it is, even though it looks a bit rough and simplistic - it seems to be popular. It **looks **a bit like some kind of Reddit knock-off. Maybe I'm just being ignorant and it was well established on Web 1.0. Do some digging, see what you can find. I wanted to take this further for you by looking in SEMRush (another tool) to get an estimate of the domain's traffic. Sadly it seems to be down or having problems right now.

Another popular link-indexing tool (Majestic) has **no information **on your post, so clearly both Moz and Ahrefs index your site more efficiently in terms of backlinks and the particular sites which you network with.

This was another interesting link found by Ahrefs: https://www.snyxius.com/where-to-begin-with-ai-development/ - Ctrl + F for the anchor text of "different industries and processes" and you'll find the link to your own article. It seems like a contextual link from a well established app / software development company in Austin, Tx. Guess what you wrote resonated.

It's not about volume of links, it's about the **quality **of backlinks. Either your links are high in quality for this post, or you have beaten the system somehow. Either way - congratulations

Not a problem!

Oh dear what a kerfuffle. People are always searching for new negative-SEO assault deployments!

In February 2018 Moz actually covered the subject of cross-domain canonical tag usage:

• https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-rel-canonical-seo-value-cross-posted-content

Apparently it can work but only under very specific circumstances:

• The content of the 'canonicaling' URL matches the canonical destination
• The headline of the 'canonicaling' URL's content matches that of the canonical destination
• In-Content Links of the 'canonicaling' URL match those of the canonical destination

So unless the content on their pages happens to be almost identical to the content on the page on your site which the tags are linking to; they're pretty much boneheads and this isn't a major concern.

In all likelihood nothing bad will happen but you could try using Google's Disavow tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main) to send them a signal that you do not wish to be 'associated' with the spam-site in question. It is unknown (or at least I haven't heard) whether the disavow tool covers canonical links. I would think that it would at least prompt Google to fundamentally disassociate the two sites.

More than likely those behind the attack are fully aware that it is extremely unlikely to harm you. They probably have a network of machine-built sites launching the same (fake) attack against thousands of webmasters. My guess is that they are preying on ignorance, hoping that some webmasters will pay them to take the tags off.

DON'T fall for it

This is usually speaking **not the right mind set **to succeed.

When Google says (through decreasing ranking positions) that you haven't put in enough effort, usually deleting a poor attempt garners no favour in the ranking results. Think about it. Google are saying "you don't have enough quality content" and your answer is to delete content, thus having less than before. Does that seem like a genuine attempt to comply with the increasing stringency of Google's guidelines?

Deleting stuff is the easy way out. Think about it as if you wrote an essay in College and Google were the examiner. They Give you a D- for your essay and mark certain areas of your work as needing improvement. If you deleted those paragraphs, did nothing else and re-submitted the essay would you honestly expect a better grade?

Google want to see effort, unique content, value-add for end users. _Real _hard graft.

If you have high volumes of pages which are identical other than one tiny tab of information or a variable price, then maybe streamlining your architecture by removing pages is the answer. If most of the pages are unique in function (e.g: factually different products, not just parameter-based URL variants etc) then it's more a comment on the lack of invested effort and you must tackle your mindset if you want to rank.

N.B: By effort I don't mean your personal effort. I could also be alluding to the fact that budget was too low when producing content. I'm describing the site - not you personally!

So from this I am assuming that you have a page with a URL string somewhat like: "examplesite.com/bike-tours". On that page you have many different regional bike tours listed so a hypothetical example might be: "examplesite.com/bike-tours/texas-bike-tour".

I don't think it's really a huge problem to leave the URL like this, particularly as it would cover the singular and plural instances which is neat. Your question though moreso referenced the on-page content and link text.

Say you have your bike tours page ("examplesite.com/bike-tours") and then on the page you have four links to four separate bike tours:

• Texas Bike Tour
• California Bike Tour
• Florida Bike Tour
• NY Bike Tour

Obviously as you stated this is probably in some kind of grid format where you have image tiles and the text links underneath.

Since at the URL layer, you pretty have "bike tour"(s) covered off, if you can find **highly relevant synonym terminology that may be advantageous **(in terms of your ranking-relevance footprint). Whilst hammering home the same thing in the way you have stated is unlikely to garner any penalty, it doesn't do 'the most' in terms of connecting with the wider search-entity (more of a thing since Google Hummingbird, but realistically entities have always been around).

What about references of "bike touring" or "Touring Texas by Bike".

Be careful. Motorcycling and conventional cycling have muddy waters in terms of their search entities and you don't want too much overlap, or to connect too much with the wrong audience. Is this cycle bike touring or proper biking / road touring?

Think of some variants. Underneath each image but before the anchor-text based link, write up your own little snippets / descriptions of each bike-tour. Use that area to really diversify and include some synonym terms.

If you don't have time for all that, don't worry - I would be highly surprised if what you have done garnered any kind of penalty. Just remember: avoiding penalties doesn't mean 'good SEO'. It's the bare minimum!

An "SEO enabled" site is not necessarily "SEO friendly" so careful how you sell it...

It is true that having pages with the same "page-name" (the last part following the final slash of a URL, e.g the page-name of this question is "ridding-of-taxonomies-so-that-articles-enhance-related-page-s-value"), which are also topically very similar - can cause 'jumpy' SERPs.

Many feel that the dangers of what is termed 'keyword cannibalisation' are over-egged. This may be true, but I have (myself) assuredly seen examples of it in action. Usually it occurs with most prominence when neither page strongly eclipses the other in terms of SEO authority (e.g: inbound signals like referring domains, citations across the web and general 'buzz' associated with a given URL).

If both pages are new with little authority (or 'popularity') bound to their unique addresses, then certainly Google can get confused. You can end up with problems like, earning a decent ranking for a related keyword - but it hops from page to page every day / week and Google's algorithm bubbles away in the background. This can make it hard to drive traffic to the correct destination.

If both pages are very specific about the keywords which they are targeting, you could turn references of those keywords on the page you don't want to rank - into hyperlinks pointing to the URL which you do want to rank! (sorry that was a bit of a mouthful)

Although TBPR (Tool Bar PageRank) was done away with aeons ago, 'actual' PageRank is still at large within Google's ranking algorithm(s). When one page links to another page with anchor text that matches a keyword, it 'gives away' some of its (ranking) value to the page receiving the link (for the specific keyword or collection of keywords / search entity in question). Think of links as 'votes' from one page to another. The difference between this and real voting is that, for Google not all votes are equal (links from more authoritative pages boost the receiving pages more than links from pages that nobody cares about). Not very progressive but still...

In general we in SEO abused this mechanic between different domains resulting in Google's current clamp-down on EMA (Exact-Match Anchor, in regard to keyword anchor text) linking. That being said: the risk from doing the same thing internally within your own website is extremely minimal, as you are just redistributing SEO authority from one page to another along a specific axiom of relevance.

That's not like when you do it from one domain to another, obviously to leech authority from an external site to your own - which in most occurrences is a violation of Google's Web-Master guidelines.

Do be careful though, don't overdo this. If the content of the page which you don't want to rank ends up stuffed full of hyperlinks, that could make the page look spammy and hurt your CRO (or earn Panda-related algorithmic devaluation).

Just don't go mental, everything should be fine.

Well, you're partly right and partly wrong in what you are saying to your boss.

What you can assuredly say is that existing ranking positions are unlikely to increase based upon increasing your keyword density / saturation.

There are many forced at work within Google's ranking results. Of those, perhaps the largest two are authority (also sometimes referred to as popularity, but that's slightly broader) and relevance.

No matter how many times you mention a keyword on a web-page (in the content, in the Meta data, in file names, in contextual tags or Schema) that doesn't increase Google's perception of your website's authority or the individual web-page's popularity.

If a piece of content or a web-page is very relevant yet it's not found to be popular, useful or authoritative - you can bet your bottom dollar that in most query spaces the page won't rank.

If the query-space is innately low quality because hardly anyone has produced decent content, then you can rank just with relevance (sometimes even on the first page). Although that's true; most such query-spaces have diabolically low search volumes (and thus aren't really worth optimising for, unless you can figure out a way to do it en-masse and soak up lots of searches - but this usually involves expensive development and strategic content deployment work).

If web-pages are over-saturated with the same exact match keyword(s) over and over; the variant of the Panda algorithm now working inline from within Google's core algo-set is likely to 'kick off'. This can result in algorithmic devaluations or manual penalties from Google (be warned). An algorithmic devaluation is usually page or keyword level, whilst with many 'manual' Google penalties (where you get a notice in Google Search Console) - **you will fail to rank **for even your brand terms.

So what does keyword density affect? Well - it's true that using keywords (or keyphrases) and synonyms (or synonymical phrases) throughout the various different facets of on-page content, coding, Meta etc will impact the relevance of a page. That's _which _keywords the page will rank for. But will it increase or decrease existing or desired rankings by itself?

In a word - NO

Thank you for your time in reading