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I would tend to agree with William here. The objective of the alt tag is to help give context to the image if the image cannot be displayed. If you are able to describe the image in a way that relates to your post, you will be better off than trying to stuff keywords in the alt tag. If an image is related to the post, search engines (particularly google) should gain a contextual understanding which is better in the long run.

In my experience, I find that the more I try to "optimize images", the more unnatural they are. Again, we are trying to be natural and helpful.

Hope that helps.

As mentioned initially, the CMS doesn't allow me to edit canonicals for individual pages that are created via facets. The other question I had about canonicals is that a rel canonical is meant to help bots understand that different variations of the same page are, in fact, the same page: example.com = example.com/. But, for the user (which ultimately bots care about), example.com/sony/50 may not always be the same as example.com/sony.

Anyways, that is a little beside the point. I have visited the options of canonicals, but I am not sure it can be done.

Hey Craig,

Thanks for your response. This is the common answer that I have found. Here is the challenge I am having (I will use your example above):

Let's say that example.com/tv/sony is the main category page for this brand, but I only carry a few Sony tvs. Therefore, the only difference between that page and this page: example.com/tv/sony/50 is a category description that disappears when further facets are chosen.

When I search in the SERPS for "Sony TVs", rather than ranking well for one of these pages, both rank moderately well, but not well enough for first page results, and I would think this is confusing to customers as well to find two very closely related pages side by side.

So, while I agree that robots.txt is a tool that I can apply for limiting search engines from getting dizzy with the facets by limiting them to (say) 4, is NOINDEX the best solution for controlling duplicate content issues that are not that deep, and more case-by-case?

One more thing I might add is that these issues don't happen site-wide. If I carry many products from Samsung, than example.com/tv/samsung and example.com/tv/samsung/50 and even example.com/tv/samsung/50/HD will produce very different results. The issue usually occurs where there are few products for a brand, and they filter the same way with many facets.

Does that make sense? I agree with you whole heartedly, I am just trying to figure out how to deal with the shallow duplicate issues.

Cheers,

It is a problem in the SERPS because if I run a query for the brand, I can see faceted variations of that brand (say "brand" "blue") is ranking right below, but neither of them are ranking on the first page. I won't NOINDEX all pages, just those that don't provide value for customers searching, and those that are competing with competitive terms that are causing the preferred page to rank lower.

It was brought to my attention through Moz analytics, and once I began to investigate it further, I found many sources mentioning that this is very common for e-commerce. Common practice is robots.txt and a plugin, but we are using a different plugin. So, for this reason, I am trying to figure out if NOINDEX meta headers are a good option.

Does that make sense?

Hey Alan,

Again, I thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately rel prev/next are not relevant in this circumstance. Also, it is all unique content on my client's own site, and I know that it is a duplicate content problem because I have 2 similar pages with slightly different facets ranking 14 and 15 in SERPS. If search engines were to choose one over the other, they would not rank them back to back.

For clarification, this is an e-commerce application with faceted navigation. Not a pagination issue.

Thanks for your input.

Hey Alan,

Thanks for your feedback. I guess I am not sure what "other solutions there are for this circumstance. The CMS does allow me to use rel=canonicals for individual pages with facets, I definitely don't think 301s are the way to go. I figured the NOINDEX, FOLLOW is best because it blocks bots from confusing duplicate content, but can still take advantage of some link juice. Mind you, these are faceted pages, not top level pages.

Thoughts?

Hey Mozzers,

I am working on a site that has search-friendly parameters for their faceted navigation, however this makes it difficult to identify the parameters in a robots.txt file. I know that using the robots.txt file is highly recommended and powerful, but I am not sure how to do this when facets are using common words such as sizes.

For example, a filtered url may look like www.website.com/category/brand/small.html Brand and size are both facets. Brand is a great filter, and size is very relevant for shoppers, but many products include "small" in the url, so it is tough to isolate that filter in the robots.txt. (I hope that makes sense).

I am able to identify problematic pages and edit the Meta Head so I can add  on any page that is causing these duplicate issues. My question is, is this a good idea? I want bots to crawl the facets, but indexing all of the facets causes duplicate issues.

Thoughts?

This is a popular plugin for managing parameters and faceted navigation in Magento: http://amasty.com/improved-navigation.html. I have read quite a few reviews on this plugin, and it seems to be referenced quite often (however I don't have experience with it).

This paired with some robots.txt should do the trick.

Hope this helps!

Is there only one page? Is there a www.example.com/something?p=2 and www.example.com/something?p=3 as well? If this is the case, you may want to look into rel="prev/next".

Hey,

I just went through this process, so I thought I would share some things that would have been helpful for me.

It is good to know what your budget is. Once you know that, know specifically what service you are looking for. Are you looking for content creation, link building, technical SEO, CRO, strategy, consulting.... Also, know your own strengths and the strengths of your team.

I contacted a few firms recommended by Moz and Distilled, and I realized that each firm has their specialties. One was a broad internet marking firm. They were more expensive, and I realized that since there were redundancies in our capabilities, I would have been paying a premium on the overlapping skills. In the end, I found a company that specifically specialized in what I really needed, and in realizing this, I was able to save as well.

Ultimately, I was very confident in all of the companies I spoke with, and if they are on the Moz list, they earned it. But make sure you are clear on what you need before you start contacting companies (unless you are looking for consulting I suppose).

I hope that my experience can help you. Good luck!

Hey Erin,

Thanks for the further explanation and clarification. I really appreciate it!

Thanks Paddy,

I wasn't aware of the cycles. Thanks for the quick response!

Hey Matthew,

It depends on you budget. I spent the last 2 weeks reaching out to different moz recommended companies, and interviewed about 5 before I cam to to a conclusion. All of them seemed very thorough and diligent, it ultimately boiled down to budget, and depth that I required. If you offered a rough budget, and it was within the range that I was looking, I could provide some feedback.

Let me know or DM me if you want more details on my experience.

hey Kelli,

i'm not entirely sure what the mock-up design is like, but I have used dropdown me us in the past, and as long as they are in html, bots should be able to crawl. I have found this article helpful on the past.: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/

Hopefully  this is helpful.

Hey Mozzers,

I have a question regarding the Open Site Explorer Recently Discovered Links.

I know that I have receive follow link from a few sites that have more DA than my site. I am wondering why it is taking so long for OSE to discover these links? I double checked the sites to make sure that they don't have NOFOLLOW (sorry for the double negative), and the sites have linked to my site for over a month now.

Any ideas? I'm not concerned about it because Search Engines have discovered those links. I am just curious why this is, or if it is normal.

Cheers!

What about something like:

San Diego Driveway Repairs & Installation | "Your Brand" OR Driveway Repairs & Installation in San Diego - Brand? With this you would want to be careful that your title element isn't too long.

If you are able to create a specific page for each of those, sgutermuth's idea isn't bad either. It depends on what you are able to create pages for. You want your home page to be the most broad and general representation of what you do, and than get more specific and long-tail with your keywords with your category and subcategory pages.

It depends a little bit on what your site structure is like.  These are just some thoughts.

Hey Chris,

I saw this Q&A post a while ago that addresses this issue. Peter answers it quite well here: http://moz.com/community/q/internal-linking-anchor-text

Hope this helps!

I know you can pay to get listed with Yahoo's Directory, but I didn't know it was fed by Yelp. Thanks for that Dudley!

I would agree with Anthony on this. I would reiterate that if your existing site has some authoritative and valuable links, you should make sure that you have an equivalent page on your new site, and contact the linking site to change the link to your new site.

David,

You are absolutely right. Ultimately it depends on whether customers will search by color or not. Thank you for clarifying this.

Cheers,